


Incentive

by Warp5Complex_Archivist



Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-25
Updated: 2006-03-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 07:53:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8094037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Warp5Complex_Archivist/pseuds/Warp5Complex_Archivist
Summary: Reed, held prisoner, slowly pieces together the events leading up to his capture, forcing him to reevaluate a lot of things, including a certain comm officer. (07/19/2004)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Kylie Lee, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Warp 5 Complex](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Warp_5_Complex), the software of which ceased to be maintained and created a security hazard. To make future maintenance and archive growth easier, I began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2016. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but I may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Warp 5 Complex collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Warp5Complex).

  
Author's notes: Alright, now I swore that after the last one I'd have a go at writing some other characters, and I still intend for the next novel to be an ensemble piece entirely, but this story popped into my head demanding it be written, and try as I might to throw it off, it keeps returning, kinda like that last party guest that shows no idea of leaving anytime soon, or that cold you thought you had thrown off only to wake up the next morning sneezing all over again. I don't want to play all my cards at once, so nothing overtly shippy, yet. but that doesn't mean I can't imply to my heart's content. And I know somebody (here's lookin' at you, Paradox, assuming you're reading) once told me that it doesn't take much for a rabid shipper to read something into it!  
  
Beta: Special thanks to shi shi for looking over this in its early stages, telling me where I was going wrong, and basically just kick-starting me whenever I stalled, thanks luv! Couldn't do it without you.  


* * *

Some might say he was a silent man, and in many ways, they would be right. He liked to keep a certain economy with words, when it suited him. It added an air of mystery, and prevented that oldest of proverbial misunderstandings; better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. But a man using silence as a shield did not necessarily have to enjoy listening to it when he found himself surrounded by quiet so dense it made his ears hurt. Today, the total absence of sound besides his own had taken on a living, breathing persona far more powerful than the roar in his head or the dull sensations of startled agony that assaulted him, more powerful, even, than his own capacity for silence...

...and it had begun, conversely, with a noise like nothing he had ever heard.

It had been a routine mission with no reason to fail, and that, perhaps, had made it a danger...defences grew lax when the crew grew complacent. When he grew complacent. He could no longer remember the incident that had sparked the notion; there was only this thin flutter of disquiet in the hollow between his stomach and his heart, and the vague impression of water and of shadows on a hillside...

He stretched out slowly on the narrow bench, flinching as the raw wounds in his back rubbed scathingly against the metal, and pressed his face into the crook of his elbow. At least he could think with the harsh overhead lights fenced back this way, his eyes masked by the cool cotton fabric of his uniform, and his unkempt hair forced back from his temples by the cuff of his sleeve. He could think, if only in droning circles like a trapped bluebottle, piecing together the remnants of the incident still in his memory; but the picture remained obstinately incomplete.

She stood out amongst the jumbled fragments like a lone flower in a battlefield, and always she uttered the same, incoherent cry; always she was gone when he opened his eyes. As she had been gone when he finally came to in the remains of the crashed alien land vehicle, startled from unconsciousness by her scream receding into the distance. As the sound penetrated the shroud of shifting black unfolding over him, his immediate thought had been one of impulsive frustration, almost anger—couldn't she see that by screaming she only drew the danger to her, gave herself away? Such an undeniably human sound could be mistaken for nothing else, she may as well have sent up a flare. If he had broken through into the conscious world long enough to continue the thought, he would have wished he could clap a hand over her mouth to silence her. But the shriek subsided, and the blackness had taken him again before a muscle could respond.

These fragments remained, an uncracked code in his head.

He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his arm harder into them; his saturated uniform stank of smoke and sweat. He had woken to find her gone and her last call for help hanging statically on the dense air, long after the mouth that had uttered it was no longer in sight. Then had come blackness until he woke here.

Wherever here was.

He took his arm away, reluctant to concede that his attempts at dredging up the sunken memories had captured nothing, but forced to accept that it was the truth. The achingly white lights glared from the low ceiling above him, stealing any inclination for rest away, obliterating his reason and leaving him with a mild drone of a headache. She was gone, and he was here, for better or for worse. He prayed, in a corner of himself where words were meaningless, that she had escaped when the vehicle crashed—but he knew, in his heart, that she had not. Hoshi rarely screamed these days unless it was a cry for help—still too naive, too innocent, to realise that it was the worst thing she could do. The help had not come because he had been powerless to give it, and the knowledge grated like a splinter under the skin; he had a duty to perform, a promise made to the captain that Hoshi would be safe in his hands, and in that duty he had failed. The penetrating silence only made the accusation echo like a tired drumbeat in his head.

He had woken the second time to this near physical silence, lying tangled on the cold metal floor and staring up into equally cold and colourless lights that hung too low over him and blotted out his peripheral vision. He had opened his eyes to this hideous glare with the expectation that he would find Hoshi here with him, and had stirred with a mild rebuke already on his tongue, only to find himself alone.

Without someone to protect, he hadn't known quite what to do. So he waited.

The gunmetal walls loomed on all sides, tapering from wide floor to narrow ceiling—and that ceiling, as he lie now on this hard bench, hung low enough for his outstretched fingers to brush against at arm's length. He could not sit upright on this bench without bending his neck, could only sit on the floor or lie, as he did now, on the thin board fastened to the wall. The room's width, such as it was, allowed him to place one palm flush against each wall and barely feel a strain in his arms.

He drank in the silence like a man willingly taking poison, hearing Hoshi's foolish outburst ring in his ears like gunshots dying on the wind. He had seen nothing of her probable capture, leaving him with the hope that there had been no capture to see...and also leaving him with a sugar-sweet taste of dread in his mouth. He couldn't help but fear that her voice, in the end, had cost her her life.

Had he heard weapons as his consciousness lapsed back into the dark? He didn't know. That fragment was one of a number still lost to him.

The low lights reflected harshly back from leaden surfaces and wormed their way into his head as the time passed, igniting flares of agony behind his eyes. His gathering headache rose from a low drone to a peevish wail, spreading disorder throughout his weary body, and the silence beat in his temples like waves pounding on the shore. It was only now that he realised, with far more anger than surprise, that for some hours he had crept and crawled about this tiny space, saying nothing, barely breathing above a whisper, afraid to cave that momentous hush. Afraid to impress himself upon it in case a part of him should be absorbed by it, and never returned.

No set of walls should be capable of doing this to him, none, however small. He was no cadet, no child, no wet-eared ensign feeling his way on shaky space-legs—he was the tactician, the defence and the offence. That he had ever forgotten that fact flowered a bloom of rage in his chest, and he nurtured that spark, tasting it, relishing it.

Anger tasted so much sweeter than fear.

He smashed his fist into the wall beside him, anticipating with almost guilty pleasure the echoes it would stir, unmindful of the pain that exploded in his knuckles; but there were no echoes to break the hush, and the pain came regardless. He punched again, and again, punishing the walls for their silence.

Eventually his fists could take the beating no more; he sank back in a boneless huddle that shuddered with every breath, his face protected from the light by the blissful dark formed in the cradle of his arms, his bruised shoulders braced against the laboured pull of his lungs. This windowless tank was little bigger than a coffin, and as he sat in the centre of it, afraid to touch those defiant walls again, it felt as if the analogy were no analogy at all.

Somewhere between breaths he ceased to count them, and he descended into a restless, heated sleep that broke like mist as a sound invaded the tank. A sound that formed words he should know, as he should know how he came to find himself here, and should know what had befallen Hoshi.

"Malcolm Reed," it said, as if no question of its validity had ever arisen or would ever arise. And Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, alone in his prison cell, shivered at the voice whose lambent tones pronounced his name like a death sentence.

It was Hoshi's.

It was Hoshi's, and yet, it was not.

* * *

He straightened instinctively at those two words, only three disconnected syllables forming a mechanical approximation of his name, waking that hungry scream in his back at the sudden movement. It almost masked the chill there. That voice was one he could never confuse; he heard it every day from the station across from his, heard it swell with laughter during a bad movie and quiver with fear in a crisis. It was hers...but this voice, at first mistakenly taken to be her, was cold as the breath of wind rattling through an opened tomb, promising a curse for desecrating ancient ground.

Malcolm waited breathlessly for it to come again, hoping to hear his first suspicions confirmed—this was Hoshi's phonetic vocabulary, recorded but filtered in some way into the abrupt address he heard now. He refused to accept that this inhuman voice originated so coldly from her lips. Whatever she had said to his 'hosts' and in whatever circumstances it had been said, she had provided the source from which this message was made, like a ransom note hacked letter-by-letter from an old magazine.

The icy hollow in his ribs clamped harder at the sound of her, one question, at least, answered by this intrusion. His visions of her in hiding, free but powerless until the Enterprise retrieved her, died in a heartbeat...but so, too, did the desperately rejected images of her lying dead in the belt of woodland where they had been forced to land. Whatever came next, she was as much a prisoner as he was. She had been alive, at least, to record this message for their hosts...there was a chance, a reasonable chance, that she was still alive now. He would take whatever chance he could get. He waited with a little more willingness, now, to listen, expecting more. The transmission did not disappoint.

"You are the tactical officer on your vessel," It—for he had to think of that sacrilegious butchering of Hoshi's voice as an 'It'—said. It was not a question.

"I am," he began, warily. The message, clearly a recording, did not allow him the luxury of responding further. It cut across him in its impersonal way, mutilating her warm tones into sonorities cold and deathly. They stuck into his bones and lodged there, chips of ice in the deepest corners of his body that would not be melted away by reason.

"You understand weapons," it said. "We have captured the prototype of a weapon our enemy would rather we never knew existed. You will make it work."

Malcolm bristled, tiny charges of electricity lighting his skin in his indignation. He held the anger like a shield, feeding from the crackle in his skin and the sweat cooling greasily down his lacerated back. "Oh, will I, indeed?" he demanded, not caring if any living soul heard his complaints. "And just why would I do that?"

But the Hoshi-voice remained silent, and if anybody heard his reply, then they ignored his questions.

Malcolm pressed his sweaty knuckles to his mouth, more in perfunctory imitation of previous experience than any real need to do so—but he felt uncomfortably nauseous, hearing so gentle a voice twisted into so clinical a messenger. His mouth felt dirtied with his failure to ask if she was safe, even though he would never have received an answer. The anger had dimmed and only a knot remained deep in his stomach, cleaving its way into his gut like a knife through steak. His lungs could not seem to find enough oxygen in the air they breathed, though air there must be, even in here. His invisible 'hosts' would have thought of that.

The truth, he discovered now, was that he expected any moment to hear the marching of boots approaching from whatever lie beyond his prison, coming to ensure that he complied with their demands. Coming to do what they should have done, before employing so unorthodox a method of communication, and to do so in the most efficient manner possible.

Everyone he had ever trained with or served with had assumed Malcolm Reed would be the kind of man to resist forcible incentives. They had surmised that his silence would not bend. They had seen an impenetrable, dutiful officer, one that would remember his place and his obligations in trying times. They had even considered him fearless.

They had been mistaken. So he had taught his subordinates and so he would do—but he was still, in some quiet corner of himself where his mind rarely went, afraid. These—people—would only be doing what was logical, what was efficient, was he himself would do in their situation. Less brutally, perhaps, than these beings may, but still he would engage in interrogations of some kind. Had even attempted to do so, all those months ago when an alien creature invaded their cargo bay.

They would do what they had to do, and so, he knew, would he. It was beyond his nature as a security officer to blame them for carrying out their duties.

He waited, counting each breath as it passed his lips, with every moment becoming more certain that those footfalls would come; but also, which every moment, daring to hope a little more that they would not. Maybe there was no way of escape but to face what came, and by accepting the inevitable in silence he would, perhaps, learn something to his advantage. It wouldn't be the first time. He may, at the least, see these people in the flesh. If he faced it. But just maybe he didn't want to have to face it quite so soon. The memory of the beating he had sustained at the hands of the Suliban was still too near.

The swish of something gliding away and the surreptitious snatch of motion in the corner of his eye startled him, but only for a split-second which he knew he would leave out of his official report, should he live to make one. A section of the wall to his left had opened onto an alcove, revealing a console whose tiny lights and beckoning blink seemed almost to grin, accusingly, at him. Maybe it was merely the position of those lights which gave the illusion of a mouth, toothless and lopsided, smirking broadly at him3/4or maybe it was his headache returning. Whatever the reason, it took only one glance for him to take an instant disliking to it. To its idiotic, grinning face, and its silent, patient hum.

Malcolm hesitated where he stood, gravitating slightly towards it, his fingers itching to explore—but he remained rooted to the floor, reticent, snatching back his hand as if burnt every time it tentatively drifted too close. This was evidently what they intended for him to use, his tool for deciphering the unseen weapon from his cell. His tactical mind clamoured, urging him to at least investigate if only to prepare a defence against their demands...but while curiosity stung like the snap of a rubber band on inquisitive fingers, he had no intention of complying with their request. There would be no point in fraternising with something in which he would not participate.

He eyed the bright console, watching its screen light up and darken down, a definite pattern formed by the repetition. All the message had said was that they required he decipher the controls, a task he was far from inexperienced with, and which excluded him, in part, from active involvement. He would not be dirtying his hands in an unknown war simply by looking. And if...if their methods were to intensify, if those marching feet did come for him, then he would rather be informed of the favour they asked of him. For all he knew, this weapon was inoperable, damaged, or fundamentally non-lethal. Its greatest danger may be no more than sleeping gas, and unless he investigated, unless he made sure of the facts, he may suffer no end of 'incentive' for nothing.

Trembling and unaware he even did so, Malcolm Reed approached the console, drawn by its siren's song, and stood, hands slack at his sides, taking in the readings on the small screen.

He knew this.

A nameless alien creation returned his stare, yet in all but the intricate pictorial language it was a system he felt he knew, a hierarchy of protocols and procedures second nature to him. He could solve the launch techniques in a matter of minutes, guided by an indefinite instinct, and barely break into a sweat. If he chose.

Slowly, Malcolm reached across and pressed the largest of the switches. The small screen sputtered and died with one final flare.

He would resist. As long as he had to.


	2. Chapter 2

The air hissed with static, and bitter-burnt charcoal fumes seemed to bleed in through his nose, his mouth, his eyes, coating the inside of his skull with poison and waking him slowly to a nauseous, feinting lucidity. His eyes streamed too badly to open them, but open them he did, blinking rapidly into the hazy blue twilight of an alien planet through acid smoke-tears. He raised his hand to palm the stinging moisture away only to encounter an obstruction, a weight pinning him down and trapping his arm to his body, preventing him from bringing his hand to his face. The crisp tips of scorched grass scratched at his downturned cheek, that numb weight pressing into his back and crushing the air from his lungs, the fizz of crackling flames and popping plastic reaching his ears. Dying sounds, all of them. The left side of his body was bathed in a swarming heat, but the right was cold, and he twisted his head with difficulty, turning his face into the cool oasis there. Into the night, and away from the flames.

Around him the blackened husk of the alien vehicle smouldered into the ground, leaving behind it craters like the aftermath of a meteor ploughing into the earth. In the morning only a charred ring of downtrodden ash would remain, druidic patterns branded into the immaculate mountain side.

Malcolm bucked against the weight trapping him, pushing backwards with his elbows, attempting to twist beneath it and somehow gain a hold from which to push.

Whatever you do, he reminded himself firmly, don't call for help.

He scoured the empty field for hostiles, poised to play dead at the first suggestion of a shadow in the trees. He would know if that shadow was Hoshi. The panic of waking to find himself trapped beneath the wreckage, his back shredded into tiger-stripes by the falling metal and his head ringing with the blow he had sustained, had given way to speechless relief...he could hope, at least, that the tank, the console, the voice, had been nothing more than a delirious fantasy. They must have been, because here he was, in the open air, moments after the crash, waking from unconsciousness to the burning husk of the unfamiliar land craft and the disorienting flames spiralling into the evening sky from the consumed materials around him. The blow to the head must have induced projections of his worst fears, of failing Hoshi and failing in his duty, and made them real.

A scream ruptured the air, fracturing over the distance between himself and its originator. A woman's scream, piercing, absolute...and human.

Hoshi. He bit down on the reply that wanted to come, reminding himself how foolish it would be to draw undue attention to himself on an alien planet. He kicked against the unseen thing that pinioned him, but the scream had already washed thin on the heavy air, and as he twisted his head awkwardly to trace the sound it was fading, failing...

Malcolm jolted awake from a doze he had not intended to take, the last shreds of Hoshi's barely-remembered cry echoing even into his dreams. Leaden walls and white lights leered over him, and the all-pervading silence swelled as the ripples of memory died. Malcolm dragged himself upright with sweaty palms, as upright as the leering ceiling allowed, shaking the dregs of sleep from his head, and blinked until his eyes adjusted to the light. His prison seemed smaller than before, pressing in on all sides like a vice, closing its jaws around him with almost gentle reproach.

Reproach, he could not help but feel, that was well deserved.

He did not go back to sleep again that night.

* * *

Not for the first time, Malcolm found himself wishing he had made it a practice to wear a watch. His grandfather had had quite the phobia about it-asserting that you can't keep time if you don't know the time-and had been scrupulous in never leaving his house without the comforting band of flexible gold plate fastened securely to his wrist. That old watch had been an antique, a Rolex with its now rare interior workings untouched and unreplaced since its original sale, and once his grandfather had permitted Malcolm to try it on, a privilege extended to very few. Grandad Reed's timepiece was not a matter to be taken lightly, or an honour to be refused. It had slithered up and down the length of his thin forearm ridiculously, the wrist of the ten-year-old he had been swamped even in its tightest setting, but with the fond indulgence that is only possible when years lie between the event and the memory, Malcolm recalled how he had worn it all that day, proudly sporting the token of Grandad Reed's unspoken affection. How his grandfather had smiled almost knowingly at a young boy's boundless enthusiasm for all things grown up.

His father had owned a watch, too. But Malcolm had never been allowed to try that one on.

Time passed, but he had no idea how much; in these cramped conditions, he was prevented even from pacing away his frustration as he might have done on any other day. He had been told that pacing was one of his more irritating habits; but it was also the most calming activity he could employ himself in when a situation was beyond his control, as this one was. Why put him in this matchbox room, after all? Were these people so much smaller than humans that all their structures would be this kind of squeeze?

A blaze of memory jabbed at him, as if a shock had stunned life into a dead battery-a line of black silhouettes against the alien moonrise, figures in silent regiments like standing stones against the leaden sky, watching he and Hoshi with a clear intent black as their armour. No. No small race, this; though the errant stab of recall ended there, with he and Hoshi stranded in a dark meadow without cover and surrounded by those grim living barriers all around, it was all he need see, for now. All he felt he could assimilate, with so much still unknown. It was enough to remember that those creatures on the hill had been human-sized, perhaps even a little more. And this bench, although positioned low between tight ceiling and floor, was the length of a man stretched out. That once blinking, now darkened console planting a maddening itch in the back of his mind was proportioned, in all its many dark keys and switches, to the span of a man's fingers. No small race at all.

He spared a glance for the room, knowing he did not need to, but compelled by dictates far deeper than mere reflex to do so again for appearance's sake. A good tactical officer took nothing for granted. If they had deliberately constructed this holding cell to be so obviously uncomfortable for even their own race, and with cause to assume a large number of other races would suffer the same problem, then it must be for one reason and one reason only-psychological advantage. They had studied he and Hoshi on that planet, that much he did not need to be told; they had known his name, known his position on Enterprise, they had probably been watching them the whole of that day as they carelessly-too carelessly-explored the alien terrain. As he carelessly explored the terrain, indulging Hoshi's requests that they land without a second thought for his command responsibilities during the mission or for her safety...why had he done that? It didn't seem like him to give way to a mere flight of fancy, be it his or another's...but one glance from Hoshi's little-girl eyes and he had crumbled faster than an unwrapped mummy, barely uttering a word of resistance. She had deserved it after all the hard work of the previous nine days, after all. It was the least he could do. He had taken the shuttlepod down to land, and now here he was, in all probability here they both were, locked away in cells clearly designed to unnerve them, frighten them, make them sweat.

Malcolm curled two fingers around the collar of his uniform, testing the skin at the base of his skull with his fingertips, dabbing at the greasy sheen clinging to the hairline. He tried not to let the presence of his own bloody sweat frighten him.

But it was difficult.

If Hoshi were being held in similar conditions, he reflected blackly, then she would be climbing the walls by now. He almost dared hope she was enjoying better treatment as their sole communications medium, in all likelihood serving not only as vocalist but as translator...but that thought was one he deadened, swiftly. Thinking about Hoshi was not going to make this situation any easier. Quite possibly her involvement in this had ended with that robotic message, and this battle was now solely his, and not hers. Quite possibly she had never even been taken, and that message had been hacked from their eavesdropped conversations as the day sailed by, and reassembled into the recording he had heard.

But he would ask, just to be sure.

Just to know that she was alright.

"It's your duty, Lieutenant," he murmured, berating himself for the hesitation as it came. "Only your duty."

* * *

He held out for what might have been minutes, had he possessed any way to mark the time besides his own biological clock remotely informing him that he was starving, but eventually the garish console won. He was still adamant that this first look would go no further...but he gave in, after a struggle, and took that first look he had sworn so vehemently against.

He punched the same button he had ascertained would kill the screen, and the monitor blinked back up with a halcyon rapidity, the dart of a hawk as it swooped on unsuspecting prey. As if it had been waiting for him to reconsider, knowing it was only a matter of time before his curiosity bettered him, and he sneaked a glimpse.

"I hate you," Malcolm muttered cordially. "Just thought I'd tell you that. Clarify our working relationship right from the start." He put his head on one side, regarding the console with a waspish smile that merely rested uncomfortably on his face with his sweat. It didn't even feel like he was smiling at all. "I can't believe I'm talking to a computer," he muttered. And got to work.

The keys were smooth under his fingers, neither warm nor cool, responding to the lightest touch of his hand...like something else that came all too readily to mind, this memory sharp as cut glass, reflecting back to him with almost vicious suddenness. He shivered, faintly.

He would think about her when the opportunity came, and when he could do so without that twang of guilt pulling at him softly. For now, he couldn't afford to.

The console, he soon discovered, was unbelievably simple to decipher. Even without a means to translate the purely iconic labels and controls it posed no problem to him, the on-screen diagrams unmistakably pointing the way. He couldn't help but smile, albeit grimly, at that; some things, it seemed, truly were universal. He followed where the blueprints led, hand resting pensively on the controls, his sweat pooling under his fingertips onto the black keys below. At every new screen to appear, Malcolm fought the overwhelming urge to remove his hand-just take it away, quietly withdraw to the far corner of this room, and clamp his hands firmly around his knees so they could not betray him again. He felt traitor enough for indulging his curiosity as it was.

You could sabotage it, a voice whispered, enticingly. Whatever this weapon is, you could change it. Shoot it into the sea, off into space, anything. Turn it into a midsummer firework if it'll make you feel better.

He entertained the notion for barely a second. No. Whatever he did to sabotage this weapon, his hosts would only return and make him do it again, sensibly this time. Had he been concerned only for himself, then he might have chanced it, weighing the good he would do against his own personal safety. The one thing they could not do was kill him, and all else could be amended. But he still didn't know, with any degree of certainty, if they had Hoshi.

He shuddered once more, remembering the day that had led to this-some of it vague, clouded, nebulous shapes drifting out of his reach...but some points, especially the breeze of her hair past his face, clung to him like rainwater. Whatever else had happened, he couldn't put her in any more danger than he already had.

As he scrolled through pages of blueprints, Malcolm's eyes opened wider, and eventually his hands slowed until he was merely staring sightlessly at the screen, palms rested on the damp keyboard, finding it hard to breathe.

It was an exact copy of Enterprise's phase cannons.

"They scanned the ship," he murmured, disconsolately. So that was how they had known his name, his rank, his job...how they had known to find he and Hoshi down on the planet, alone, isolated. Foolishly isolated. They had been watching, and no doubt waiting. He could not help but wonder, his stomach twisting like a cyclone and his head swimming faintly, just how much these people had seen. There were things he had allowed to happen that day that were not meant for outside eyes, things he did not even know how he himself felt about. And Hoshi...

...she deserved better than to be spied on because of him.

Feeling his heart beating, sounding strange echoes in his skull like music through water

(I know you're afraid of the water, Malcolm)

he pressed the button for the next screen, hoping he would be proven wrong. After all, he hadn't recognised the system so readily on his first peep. Perhaps the alien laguage and the unaccustomed computer were muddling his judgement, making the familiar feel strange, and the strange familiar.

It was then that the pulse thumping so hotly in his temples stopped altogether.

It was a sensor scan, evidently utilising the same precise means of data-gathering as the sweep that had allowed these beings to duplicate Enterprise's phase cannons. A labyrinthine tracery of fine, electric lines represented a vast complex of some kind, apparently their intended target; and between these lines, some moving, some stationary, were thousands of tiny red dots like swarms of locusts on a field of wheat.

Red dots. Moving red dots.

Lifesigns. Although the language surrounding this diagram told him nothing, he did not need to see a number. There were thousands, and this phase cannon was trained directly on them.

Trembling, Malcolm reached out, blindly, and shut off the monitor for the second time. Suddenly the idea of crawling away, of removing himself from this staring console and waiting for a better turn of events to present itself, had never been so attractive.

* * *

He removed himself physically from the console, but he could not remove it from his sight; it faced every other corner of this tiny tank, blank-eyed and grinning like a skull. Sooner or later his hosts would wonder why he hadn't done as they demanded, and would contact him again-whether by that sickening perversion of Hoshi's voice or in person, he wouldn't like to say. Either seemed equally unappealing, but either was better than sitting here, bored but unable to pace, exhausted but unable to sleep, and so hungry his hands shook. He had gone long periods without food before, but this was different; those times had been largely voluntary, and correctable if the need became harmful; here he was stuck, and his incapability chafed him.

There was nothing for his mind to do but wander, and without other stimulation he had no choice but to let it go where it pleased, too tired to bother with disciplining his thoughts anymore. The mission had gone well, in its early stages; he had never seen Hoshi so speechlessly happy as when she exchanged ritual bows with the head of the council, initiating a first contact that would be cited in Enterprise's-and indeed, Starfleet's-records for years to come as one of their first true successes. Logic had selected her for the task, her linguistical skill far overriding any diplomatic qualifications the others might possess, but secretly Malcolm attributed her stunning reception to one far more obvious, and all too regrettably concealed, reason:

The woman was exquisite.

From the moment they had set foot in the capital to the moment the deal was officially sealed, Hoshi Sato had carried herself with grace, modesty, and effervescent charm. She accepted the honours and receptions thrown for her as an ambassador with gracious willingness to sample their delicacies, observe their formalities, speak their flowing language. She had dressed in their fluid robes and styled her hair in crumpled ribbons as they did, had flattered them, questioned them and complimented them. But Malcolm?

He had been at her side, at every formal dinner and every festive gathering-present but silent, offering a nod when he was greeted, using his duties as security officer as an excuse to hide behind her. He had eventually allowed her to dress him more appropriately, though he had flatly refused the jewellery she extended to him. He had done his duty, and been her eyes and ears while her physical senses were otherwise engaged...but when it came down to it, all he had been was a jumped-up bodyguard with nothing to do.

He couldn't help but be a little jealous of her instant success, especially as his own efforts had fared so badly. But she had thanked him. Not once during all their nine days in the capital itself, not in any way he could confess to another living soul...but on the tenth day...today...

Malcolm shifted his weight a little where he sat, and scrubbed a hand wearily across his face, feeling the first beginnings of stubble with dismay. It had been a mistake to let his mind wander. He wouldn't do it again.

He was debating lying down for a while, if only to spare his legs from any worse cramp than he already had, when there was a crackle, and the voice came again. It filled the tiny space with dead echoes.

"Why have you not launched the weapon?" it said, tonelessly.

Malcolm closed his eyes at Hoshi's voice once more, and swallowed. His throat was swollen with thirst. "Because that's not what I do," he said, quietly. "You want me to shoot that thing at thousands of people. I don't know what impression you have of me, but I'm not a killer."

"We have knowledge of your vessel. We know you are the tactical officer. Destruction is your job. Make the weapon work."

The accusation bit; not because it was true, but because of what it made him out to be. "In a fair battle, I would," he growled, between his teeth. "I do what has to be done to disable an enemy ship. But I don't destroy them. Give me credit that I have some ethics. Even if you don't." He waited, doubting that this message, like the first, was anything more than a recording; and doubting, in tandem, that anybody could hear him.

There was only ambiguous silence.

"Where's Hoshi?" he demanded, after a moment.

"We are willing to hold you here until you comply," the voice repeated, regardless of his question. "The target has been selected for you. We know you can operate this weapon."

"The 'target' looks suspiciously like the capital," he shot back, hotly. "And as I remember even the southern suburbs had a population of five million. That phase cannon would easily annihilate enough of the city to kill five thousand, maybe more."

"The target has been selected for you. Make the weapon work."

Malcolm growled low in his throat, and smashed his fist into the wall once more. It raised no more echoes on this second occasion than it had on the first. He no longer doubted that at least one of these beings heard him, and to a degree understood him-with or without Hoshi's help, he didn't know. But the answers he received all made use of those same few sentences, clearly all they had prepared and recorded, each time selecting the phrase which closest matched his inquiry or the answer they wished to give. He doubted he would get more from them until they had gone away and spliced together a larger vocabulary.

Good. The more reason he gave them to keep Hoshi alive, if she really were here, the better.

A moment later every one of those assumptions was crushed. "The woman will be terminated unless you comply," the voice replied, pleasantly. "Make the weapon work. You have one hour."


	3. Chapter 3

This time the monitor he hated with such black passion jolted to life on its own. Gone were the blueprints, the dots, the aerial survey map; in their place, only a row of cold green zeros glowed, apparitions in a dream he couldn't wake from. Not this time. As he watched, fascinated and morbidly hypnotised, those numbers clicked from 0:00:00 to 0:00:01.

One hour. The voice had gone, and with it, all chance of negotiating, of offering something other than this favour in return for Hoshi's life. He would have been prepared, if communication had been possible, to build them anything they wanted, anything it lie within his sphere of expertise to build. Stun weapons, sensor enhancements...EM barriers...

But it had not gone so well the last time he attempted to duplicate his success against the gestalt creature in their cargo bay, and he had been forced to put the first occasion down to a fluke. A lucky break. He doubted anything else he might offer would interest these people enough to make them abandon their beloved captured phase cannon, and everything but those minute adjustments to the EM shields would be every bit as available in Enterprise's computers as the cannons had been. But he had never, since those experiments, entered his personal tweaks into the computer's original specs. If these people tried to build their own EM emitters from the blueprints, they would no doubt fail as Starfleet had done.

Malcolm couldn't help but feel vitally possessive over the achievement, lucky break or not. If they wanted to recreate those barriers, they would need him to do it. But clearly they did not intend to speak with him again except to reinforce those few, caustic words that had cut him to the quick. They would need Hoshi to produce anything more, and she...

Unless he fired on five thousand innocent people, she would be dead in approximately fifty-eight minutes.

Malcolm slumped down where he knelt, pressed his hand to his eyes to force away the dreadful pound already beginning there, and for a long time, he neither thought nor felt anything at all.

* * *

There was no escaping the stark reality of those numbers; of that they had made certain. He might close his eyes but the light pounding down on him pierced through, making voluntary blindness no protection at all. He might turn his back to that console but a morbid fascination tugged him toward it again like iron to a magnet, making him twist where he lie, waking arrows of pain in his shoulders but satiating his appalled curiosity. The lit numbers on that tiny screen flew past, too slow to endure, too fast to deny. Each precious second squandered ought to have registered as one less in which to save her; instead each seemingly abstract digit was merely one less second of indecision left to him. Soon, that counter would roll from 00:59:59 to 01:00:00, and this terrible responsibility would be taken from him. The burden would be lifted. Soon, no compromise he could stoop to would make a difference to her anymore. The time to act would have passed; the stillness, the luxury beyond it to grieve, beckoned him with gentle menace. He wanted it to be over.

For some while now Malcolm had merely lie, overcome by an absent tremble that would not be stilled and a cold sweat that would not be staunched. Neither concerned him. Those numbers changed in flickers of bitter light but there were others that did not, and would not; one woman versus five thousand civilians. One life for many.

Only it wasn't just one life...it was her life.

They had known. If they had watched him all this time, then a part of him understood he had been studied to discover his weakness. Today on that beautiful alien planet he had handed it to them on a plate.

Malcolm huddled under the bench, his eyes hypnotised by that taunting console, but his hands clamped firmly beneath him, the only restraint he had left. His body lie inert, but his mind raced, the returning memories far from idle, and unavoidably it led him back to the events that had stranded him here...and put Hoshi's life in the balance...

It had been a routine mission with no reason to fail, and that had made it a danger. It had been a routine mission until he grew complacent. He could no longer remember the incident as he would like; but he remembered, at last, why they had ever been in the firing line.

The giddy success that had met Hoshi's first mission emancipated from the guiding eye of the captain, T'Pol, and Commander Tucker had bred arrogance...not hers, but his. Malcolm alone had accompanied the initially apprehensive ensign to the planet, to pilot the shuttlepod and provide a perfunctory protection none of them had truly considered necessary on so idyllic a planet. Welcome the shore-leave as he may, he had been mildly chagrined at being designated 'nursemaid'; but Subcommander T'Pol apparently considered that Hoshi would feel more independent if a crewmember not far removed from her own rank were her escort.

Malcolm felt sure there was an insult buried in there somewhere.

The ten-day mission had been successfully completed in only nine, and on their premature return he had dipped the shuttle down low to sweep the cusp of the mountain ranges due north of the capital, delighting the confident new Hoshi with whom he returned-and doing so, he must admit, for that very reason. She had not seen him steal that one, brief glance to her-of that much, he had been careful-but as they nose-dived, he had done so, once, and seen her face aflame with sheer, luminous joy. He would never admit as much to a living soul; but seeing her so eminently happy at his command had restored a little of the self-esteem he had lost, dwarfed by Hoshi's resounding triumph against his own failure during those nine days. The council members had wanted one thing and one thing only from him, and he had been unable to give them even that much. But at least, he had thought rather childishly, he was still good for something.

Her elation had saturated the small cabin like a drug, seeming to infect him through his skin. He had turned a faint, indulgent smile towards the helm, hiding it from her-but she had known, all the same. Otherwise, she would never have suggested they land. Enterprise did not expect them back for another day, she had argued; what prevented them from using that day to explore the rest of the planet?

Shaken from his sour reverie, Malcolm cast a disgusted glance over the counter that now read 00:32:37. Twenty-eight minutes to complete a task he had regularly completed in so little as six. Twenty-eight minutes, and the light that had seemed to accompany her wherever she went would be extinguished, for good.

He closed his eyes despite the malicious glare burning an angry orange through his eyelids, holding fast to that one, radiant image-Hoshi's eager, goat-footed step as she leapt from the shuttlepod and sank her bare toes into an alien grass on which no human had trod before...

* * *

" Careful down there," he called absently after her, raising his head barely enough to direct his warning voice through the hatch, but not enough, alas, to take his eyes from his swift inventory to ensure that she were still within earshot. His outward reluctance to land, albeit a lie, had apparently not done enough to instil any caution in her. Wherever the old, flinching Hoshi had gone-and no matter how intoxicating her new-found enthusiasm was-a part of him wished she would come back. "Ensign...for all you know there might be huge poisonous insects hiding in that grass just waiting for a nice, juicy foot to tread on them."

"If they're that hungry, they're welcome!" she returned, tossing the reply blithely back over her shoulder. Malcolm tutted indulgently, and tested the cell of his phase pistol one last time. Hoshi's understandable euphoria had yet to fade, he could see; usually she hated bugs.

They had put down in what appeared, from all scans, to be a natural concavity between two pillars of pale, shrouded mountains, a line of faded opal rising in smooth ridges, and the insects he warned against had been the largest biosigns in sight; he had felt satisfied that this uninhabited land was safe enough territory to explore alone, should Hoshi's new-found curiosity extend so far. And, he must admit, his own interest could not help but be a little piqued now that he felt this solid alien soil beneath his feet.

He shaded his eyes with his hand, squinting to make out the distant blue of water between the hills, the lines of the mountains beyond, framing the green slopes around them. Everywhere the colours quivered with noonday sun, and already the heat had soaked through his thin beige desert uniform and drenched his back with warm sweat. The perspiration tickled as it streamed down his spine and cooled there. If he closed his eyes, this could almost be Earth-but a good armoury officer did not close his eyes on an alien planet, and the whim was not permitted to take hold. He picked up his pace, and jogged lightly over to her.

"Slow down, Ensign," he said crisply. "This is one of those rare occasions where we do have all day."

Hoshi graced him with her best exasperated smirk, and glanced pointedly down at her feet. "You know, Lieutenant, you really should take those boots off," she suggested, impishly. "There's nothing quite like feeling alien grass between your toes."

"No, I'm sure there isn't. I'm also sure there's nothing quite like feeling an alien creature bite you in the heel."

"Killjoy," she accused. Then she turned, and walked on. Malcolm could do nothing but follow her.

The shuttlepod receded behind them until it vanished altogether into the cloying heat-haze, with only meadow land below and blue sky above, a blue so rich it was an incandescent turquoise in colour, stretching unbroken in all directions; save ahead, where the looming mountains reared forward into a near precipice which sparkled iridescently in the light, glittering with perpetual motion. A waterfall. It was for this that Hoshi was headed when there came an unearthly shriek.

* * *

There was a difference, he now found, between a girlish shriek such as that and the true scream to come later; one was by its very nature a conscious drama, a means of asserting femininity in a fundamentally unthreatening scenario-few men shrieked like that-but the other, often reflexive and unplanned, could cut to the marrow. Malcolm let the numbers in his direct line of sight wash into his eyes, but his brain did nothing with the sensory input. 00:38:51 should mean more to him than this, but he was inexorably pulled by the unfounded belief that somehow time would freeze and the moment he dreaded, the moment when Hoshi was dead and no decision of his could any longer alter that, would not come. That shriek had taken him, with the tolerance that was every big brother's prerogative, back to all those times in the past when Madeline would see a spider and squeal until he deigned to come and remove it for her. Sometimes, rather wickedly, he had made little attempt at haste-the sight of her standing on a chair with her arms clasped protectively around her head was just too amusing to waste in chivalry.

It had been no spider that startled the yelp from Hoshi that morning...but even on a young woman high on conquest, the effect had been the same.

* * *

The horrified squeal had no sooner petrified in his blood when Malcolm's booted feet loosened, and he darted in the direction of that sound instinctively, imagining the worst; that the sensors had failed to detect some aggressive breed of indigenous life form, that she had somehow misjudged this alien landscape and suffered a physical injury, and any number of potential disasters besides. It had been wrong of him ever to bring her down here, wrong to assume this kind of responsibility...

He found her rooted motionless in an expanse of gentle, heathery turf, her arms clasped about her shoulders like a limpet to a rock, her face a sodden ashy oval above them. Her eyes burned wide with a fluctuating combination of fear and disgust, and cut straight through the grass at her flinching feet like a phase beam. As he slowed and watched she hopped from one foot to another, keeping each from the ground as long as the natural force of gravity would allow.

There, in the grass, were crowds of leggy, black bugs the size of golf balls, scuttling industriously between the faintly silver blades.

"Problem, Ensign?" he asked pleasantly.

The last wisp of colour clinging to her face melted away, and her huge dark eyes raised to his in silent apology. "I don't think they're hungry," she said, in a small voice.

"No," Malcolm baited her, still polite to an offensive degree.

Hoshi shuddered, squeezing her arms about her like a vice as if that would somehow protect her. At the sound of a slight, unconscious whimper escaping her throat, Malcolm holstered his drawn phase pistol, and quickly closed the space between them. He halted close beside her, silent, tight-lipped, his eyes downturned. She would be embarrassed enough at this display later on as it stood...by turning away, he hoped to spare her any further humiliation. As he came close her quiver seemed to cut through him like a gale.

"Steady, Ensign," he said, softly-placing the words almost in her ear, mindful of her closeness and the inevitable discomfort involved, but more concerned, for now, with maintaining that degree of secrecy he had hoped to instil. Hoshi's eyes darted to him and held there, unforgivingly drawing his gaze up no matter how determinedly he forced it down. All he had said was two, unimportant words-but she knew, he felt certain, that with them he was promising to keep this between them. Gingerly, Malcolm hooked his left arm under her knees, his right circling her back, and lifted her from the ground in one fluid motion too swift for her to protest. He was not sure she would have protested if she could-the black creatures were swarming thickly now, presumably drawn by their body heat or their scent.

"Perhaps next time a superior officer tells you to put your boots back on, you'll listen," he said, archly, as he carried her away.

* * *

What had appeared a tranquil glittering of water streaming over slick-faced rock was altogether different from the tempest whose cool-scented spray stung them as they approached, but for all his world and this he would not have exchanged the reality for the illusion. The coarse rain striking up from rock and pool lashed through their thin uniforms and soaked them from skin to bone, driving a delicious chill deep into the day's heat, and battering the breath from them.

Malcolm felt Hoshi cringe in against him instinctively as the curtain of impenetrably white water hit, and he swayed a little unsteadily on his feet, his balance thrown as much by her sudden movement as by the water's assault. Hoshi gasped against the hollow of his throat, for once uncovered in his desert uniform, and he felt her lips quiver over his skin in a light, skipping dance. Then she swallowed, taking in a mouthful of the falling shower before he could warn her otherwise, and broke into an abrupt, musical laugh.

Malcolm twisted uncomfortably and saw her face creasing at her private joke, her brimming amusement seeming to set the edges of the rain alight with tiny lines of fire. She met his puzzled glance, and erupted into an even bolder laugh. Malcolm found himself returning it before he even knew what he did.

"Aren't you going to tell me not to drink this?" Hoshi prompted impishly, raising her voice a little to rise above the thunder of the waterfall breaking over rock on its inevitable journey. "Not until it's been sampled, tested, and prodded first? I don't recall being allowed to eat a single thing this week without your scanner having something to say about it."

He chuckled and turned his head up to the downpour, mouth open to receive a little of it. It tasted faintly salty, neither so clear as spring water nor so brackish as the sea...but it also left a faint tingle on his tongue like ice, and slipped smoothly down his throat like bourbon.

Hoshi laughed harder, and whooped in response.

He set her down a little further along the shallow bank of the pool where the spray did not reach so far or so fast, and where the rock at least made a pretence at dryness, even if it failed miserably to deliver. For a second as he slowed at the spot he merely stood and held her, his arms tired but his mood now fully awake; she had made him laugh. There were few, some days too few, of whom the same could be said.

"Your arms must be killing you," she said, earnestly.

"They are," he replied.

"Better put me down, then. I don't want to throw our armoury officer's back out. Whatever would the captain say?"

He smiled, but it was thin and faintly sour after his sudden good humour. As he set her carefully down, her bare feet finding the smooth wet rock and accepting her weight, he couldn't help but be disgusted at himself for that little display. He had drank alien water with no way of knowing that doing so would be safe-fine. He had laughed at no visible joke and perhaps made a fool of himself-again, fine. But for the life of him he could neither explain or excuse the strange hesitation that had come over him when he set her down at last.

He watched her carefully, searching her cautious moves and distantly satisfied face for a sign, any sign, that she thought his behaviour as odd as he did himself-and as inexcusable, embarrassing, as he did. There was nothing to mar her smooth coffee-cream face but a few black whips of saturated hair streaking down her cheeks and a faint, barely surfacing smile touching her lips. Whatever lie behind it, clearly it would suffer no intrusion, and no questioning.

Malcolm did not want to risk soaking his scanner any more than was absolutely necessary, so he did what Captain Archer had advocated so long ago, in what seemed a different world, a different time, from this; he explored this strange new world with his own living senses, taking back for humanity what should belong to no lifeless probe. He had tasted the salty-sweet water and smelled the ozone-charged frost of scent in the humid air; now he looked, and saw this waterfall for the first time.

The strong deluge plunged down a cliff not quite sheer in its shape; it had form enough, he surmised, to break through the curtain at intervals and rent the water into forks, which tumbled on their own course to break again lower down the rock face. And the rock, he could now see, was opalescent, causing those flashes of sunlit colour he had seen even from the shuttlepod when they landed, like noonday flares on glass. He almost wished he had thought to borrow Trip's camera...but of course, this little landing-party had been anything but planned.

He squinted, fencing back the overhead sun with his flattened hand to his brow, and noticed that his first assessment was not entirely accurate; there was a stretch of water, quite low down the cliff and close to the pool's turbulent foaming surface, where the curtain did not break. It fell straight down into the deepest sinkhole of the dark lagoon, as if no rock existed there to interfere with gravity. A cave, perhaps, screened from view and completely inaccessible.

Hoshi had skipped along the line of marble-like stones and scrub that made up the bank, and was gazing out past the peninsula that ended in the blunt-faced cliff he studied. She appeared to be looking hard at something in particular which he was ignorant of. Malcolm left his geological survey to approach her on silent feet, his stealth training fully engaged, and halted close at her shoulder to stare out along her line of sight. Barefoot, she stood quite a little shorter than him, and he found himself gazing out across the misty expanse over the sleek line of her dampened hair and wet brow. She did not move a muscle, as he had somehow expected her to do-she seemed perfectly at ease with his unnecessary proximity.

"What are we looking at?" he asked.

"Don't you see it?" She tilted her head, and her hair breezed teasingly past his face-but she did not turn to look at him.

"See what?"

"There's an island out there. The lagoon stretches right around this peninsula where there's calm water, and if you look away to your left, just tucked behind that ridge...there's an island. It can't be so far out as it looks."

"I think I see it. But why the interest, Ensign?" Although, he thought sickly, already an idea was forming to explain her intrigue; and he couldn't say he liked it much.

"Don't you just...feel like a swim on a hot day like this?"

"Might I remind you, Ensign, that we have no way of knowing the chemical composition of the water on this planet? Besides, I would have thought you'd be less than eager to repeat that little display back there over the spiders."

"They were not spiders."

"They looked suspiciously like spiders to me..."

Still refusing to turn, Hoshi leant backward and nudged him gently in the ribs. Malcolm hissed in the briny air through his teeth, startled, and reached out to tug her hair chidingly.

Whatever else had come later, that moment was the moment when everything between them had been unstoppably set in motion.


	4. Chapter 4

Alone in his cell, Malcolm squeezed his eyes shut, knowing only moments would pass before he was compelled to open them again; her time was fading fast. Unaware of what he did, his fingers crept for the slashed neckline of his shredded beige desert shirt, tucking themselves gingerly beneath the sweaty fabric at the top of his spine, and pressing without artifice against the gash drawn between his shoulderblades.

It had begun to itch in this last hour, and that, he knew, was a sign of its starting to heal...but that stickiness still met his fingers, and when he brought his hand back in his line of sight, he saw that the tips were red, each tiny swirl in the skin brought into sharp and bloody relief. Something in him couldn't equate the numb robot studying his own blood without concern or understanding to the man that had quivered at the touch of a woman's hair on his face-a woman, who, until today, had seemed more a girl to him. The memory was there, sharp enough to hurt far more than the wound he had knowingly angered, but it belonged to someone else. Either that man, the one that had found his introspection cut short by a small female hand splashing him with a flick of her wrist across the water's surface was Malcolm Reed, or else the military machine sitting idly by while that woman was murdered was he. One had been an impostor, but here and now, he had no idea which.

He willed himself to keep his eyes closed against the reminder that shared this room with him, and allowed himself to dwell on that other man's all-too-vivid memories.

He did not see the counter click from 00:41:59 to 00:42:00.

* * *

He had fought her pleas by the pool to the last, citing protocols lost and buried until today, fabricating a barrier between her insistent questions and his failing modicum of control; but still, though her requests to swim out to the island had been positively refused, he couldn't help but feel that in some less obvious way she had won. From her impassive face she had known his arguments for what they were-excuses flimsy as the curtain of spray, breakable by a breath of wind, but beyond her ability to refute. He was her superior officer, and she would do as she was told...but in hindsight, Malcolm felt his mouth go dry at the lowness of his tactic.

"I'm sorry, Ensign, but until I see a proper analysis of this water I don't intend to allow any subordinate of mine to submerge themselves head to toe in it." No matter how much they blink their big eyes at me, he thought, but did not say.

She had pouted, deliberately he knew; but still he wondered now, with that sick flutter in his ribs reprising itself joyously as if thrilled by the opportunity, if that half-facetious pout had been designed to disguise real disappointment on her part. The realisation helped his conscience none.

All she wanted was a swim. Something she probably hasn't done in over a year. You wouldn't even let her do that, and now she's going to die without ever having...

He choked the thought then and there, knowing that if he allowed the recriminations to enter in, they would take root, tearing up the pleasant memories she had given him like ivy slowly plundering a wall of its foundation bricks. Before long, he would remember her only for this hour of agony, and the knowledge that he had failed her in every way.

00:43:00 came and went. Malcolm curled up under the bench, drawing his knees up to his chin and firmly lacing his treacherous hands together around them until cramp took hold in his right arm. He covered his eyes with the palm instead, knowing that within moments he would be compelled to take it away again, but taking refuge in this slight darkness as long as he could. The siren called, and this sailor was powerless to resist.

He could still see her face, if he closed his eyes, if he willed himself away with every battered shred of spirit he had left; he fled back to that afternoon by the lake with a poison cocktail of relief and dread bubbling painfully in his stomach. She had looked at him, that he remembered with bitter fondness. She had looked at him, one of those special looks which was neither exasperated nor truly accepting, but somewhere in the unreadable haze between. Spray kicked up around them, alighting in her hair and settling like tiny diamonds beading the black. In his mind, for one precious second, there were no numbers, no cold equation, and all that consumed him was the dilemma of the deep black water beside him and the pleading, faintly hardened dark eyes in front of him.

"Don't look at me like that," he said, striving for his old, quiet assertiveness.

"Like what?" she replied tightly.

"Like I'm a bad dad that won't let his kid have an ice cream."

She half-turned her right shoulder to him, facing inland once more...and away from the ebony lake. "It makes no difference to me, Lieutenant," she murmured. In the darkening afternoon the flash of her eyes and the pale glimmer of her even teeth were bright as milk quartz. Without looking at him, her eyelashes lowered, she muttered: "Thanks for letting me take a look around."

And, bugs forgotten and bare toes curling in the cooling grass, she made as if to leave.

Malcolm, even those hours on, couldn't understand why he had done what he did next-he shot out his hand, reflexes alight like little dots of fire at his nerve-endings, and tipped her elbow with his palm.

"Ensign..." His voice died as her eyes fell questioningly on him, and his hand slackened and self-consciously slid away. "We don't have to be back at the rendez-vous for a few hours. I'm sure there's plenty more to see." It was the closest he could come, the closest he had ever come, to an apology.

She blinked, startled. "What did you have in mind?"

He withdrew his phase pistol and held it a little away from him with a shrug. The dark eyes that followed his movements were still distant, even cold; but a hint of a smile teased the corners of her mouth. "According to the captain, a phase pistol starts a very good campfire."

So a campfire it was.

* * *

Malcolm had extended his spread palms to the spout of red flame, ostensibly because the night had grown unexpectedly cold as the light withered into tattered rags glimpsed in moving shadow; but secretly, he did so because a vanity existed somewhere inside him that this was the proper thing to do. That it was the only thing to do.

The distant island had been swallowed in a darkening sea-mist to the west, its solid rise a row of jagged black teeth against a sun yellow as egg yolk and shot through with wisps of spiralling madder, like trails of blood caught in the sun's dying amber vapours. Now, as dark descended, the island and its magnificent lake were black shapes swarming through the wavering heat-haze of the campfire he had lit. The campfire he had lit for Hoshi. To stop her pouting.

He was going soft.

She sat with her knees drawn up under her chin and her arms clasped around her legs, her bare toes wriggling at the comfortable throw of warmth. He could not help but notice that the nails had been painted a liquid gold the colour of the fire-fly flecks that danced in her eyes, a surely unplanned and unconscious complement. Hardly Starfleet issue...but he let it rest. He couldn't help but like the way the fire's reflections danced in their bright mirror-shine.

"We should have brought marshmallows," he mused, gazing distantly into the fire, a wistful smile painting his lips. It felt warm on his face, even though a different heat to the one thrown by the fire. The shapes in the flames melted into patterns, first a mist, then a dancing woman, finally an oriental dragon. "If we really wanted to push the boat out we could make it chestnuts."

She smiled fluidly back at that, the same remote stillness settling on her. "Chestnuts," she replied, firmly. "Chestnuts seem more...refined. Sophisticated."

"I'd have to agree with you there. Plus they sound just like machine-gun fire if you don't prick them properly."

There was a silence, and it was comfortable. For once Malcolm did not feel condemned for his lack of words. It occurred to him then as it never had before-despite Hoshi's apparent love of language, she could be oddly understanding of the reluctance he clung to, and so often she used her own arsenal of words as if each cost a small fortune; to great effect, but without any degree of verbosity. There was none of the unadulterated flood he would have expected from a young, gifted linguist. The dichotomy, he must admit, was intriguing.

"Thank you," she said, suddenly. She was staring into the fire, her dark eyes like distant black holes devouring the light. He tore his eyes from the flaming dance to look at her, startled.

"For what?"

"For letting me take a look around today. You didn't have to." Her gaze was suddenly on him, direct, even challenging. The fingers of her right hand twisted lazily in the silvered grass, tearing up root and blade with her knuckles. Whatever the bugs had been, it seemed the fire had scared them away. "Somehow I didn't expect you'd agree to it. I don't think most would." She smiled, slyly, and he knew if she were laughing at anybody then she was laughing at him. "T'Pol certainly wouldn't."

"I'm sure Commander Tucker would have jumped at the chance of a little exploring," Malcolm replied reasonably. He was unable to tear his eyes away from her mutilating fingers, fascinated by their sudden twist and tug. "Only I assume he'd prefer the marshmallows."

Hoshi casually threw a handful of shredded grass on the fire. "Isn't a campfire a violation of safety protocols? I'd have thought the smoke could be seen for miles. We'll have every native for a hundred miles come charging over the hill any minute. It'll be like that scene in 'Zulu' all over again."

"Probably. I mean, yes, it is against it...normally I wouldn't dream of it."

"Then why do it now?" She paused, watchful, and foolishly, for a fleeting moment, he thought her unsuspecting attack on his guilty heartrate was over and done. An instant later he was forced to realise it was not nearly so unsuspecting as he had imagined.

She tossed more grass into the flames and watched the blades blacken in into spider-fine threads of gold-lit ash. "I know you're afraid of the water, Malcolm," she said.

"Whatever gave you that idea, Ensign?" He said it with as much dignity as he could muster, but that was regrettably little. The moment he turned his eyes away she would know.

"I don't mean to sound...rude. But it's obvious, Lieutenant. After drinking that water and lighting this fire, I don't buy that you wouldn't agree to a swim because you were concerned for my safety."

Despite its amounting to a confession, Malcolm's desire to turn his eyes away stole over him again, flooding him like the waterfall he could distantly hear in the distance. "There's a big difference between drinking a mouthful of water and chucking ourselves into potentially shark-infested waters. How did we know what was in there? Man-eating eels, maybe. Forgive me but I didn't much feel like being a main course."

"We had our scanners," she said quietly. Somehow the soft tone stung him in a way a yell could never have done. "Nothing bigger than a bug, you said. Before we landed."

"Funnelwebs are 'no bigger than a bug', but sit on one and you're still dead."

Hoshi was silent a moment. She had retrieved a stick from the edge of the fire where the flames had yet to taste and catch hold, and was dilligently scraping a furrow in the turf as if prospecting for gold. As, he mused twistedly, was precisely what she was doing.

"I know what it's like to be afraid, Lieutenant. If there's one thing you've taught me it's that being brave doesn't mean you're not afraid. It's not how you feel...it's what you do that counts."

Malcolm was sure that, if he had been able to see his own burning face, it would be as red as the heart of the flames. The comfortable warmth had grown uncomfortably hot. "The captain knows," he said, quietly. "But no-one else. I'd appreciate it..."

"If I didn't tell anyone." She grinned. "Only if you don't tell about the spiders."

"Oh, so they're spiders now, are they?"

Hoshi leaned over, and aimed a swipe at his arm. He deflected it effortlessly, his hand snapping up to connect with hers and twisting to capture her slim wrist swiftly; for that instant he regained the control he normally held so well over his own features. He challenged her with impenetrable sternness.

The fire spat softly in the silence.

"What are you afraid of, Malcolm?" she said in a murmur.

Malcolm had opened his mouth to reply when Hoshi's head darted abruptly to one side, straining her ear towards the flames with intense concentration crinkling her smooth brow. "Do you hear that? A sort of hissing sound?"

"Hissing sound? Don't tell me there are snakes now as well."

She waved him quiet with her free hand, listening. "Steam," she announced, a moment later. "Is it raining?"

Malcolm was about to reply in the negative when thunder tore the marine-blue sky apart. The rain that had barely registered as a hiss of vapour in a roaring fire suddenly descended like a downpour in the deeps of the rainforests-even as Malcolm pulled Hoshi to her feet by her captive wrist, the fire that had commanded such violent heat was merely a rising pyre of windblown ash reaching for the shattered sky.

"Race you," Hoshi shouted. She had tugged her hand free and was gone before Malcolm even knew that she had spoken.

* * *

They ran, Hoshi's bare toes sinking into the soft ground, the cuffs of their uniforms soaked dark around their ankles by wet grass and wetter earth. Imprints of her slender soles and his heavy boots blazed across the land like a scar. Malcolm slowed his sprint to match hers, but deep down, he wanted to run-to just take off across open ground with the driving rain stinging his upturned face and the dark malevolence of the boiling thunder overhead, casting ever-changing shadows on the fields below. He hadn't run like this in far longer than any human should have to admit to.

They raced into a clustered grove of trees, mangled mud and grass squelching wetly at their feet, the stormy moonlight filtered into lightning-blue flecks by the dense canopy of leaves; the rain cascaded like the waterfall they had abandoned from the outermost ring of branches and formed a milky curtain. Hoshi skidded to a halt in the instant before Malcolm, her face turned up to the sky, her head back, drinking in the water as he had done only earlier that day. Then she laughed, and the sound rang musically through the trees in time to the rain's percussion. She seemed completely unaware of him, watching her silently as she smoothed her drenched satin ribbons of hair back with her palms.

"I won," she declared.

Malcolm smiled, but his wet lips felt oddly senseless. "Yes. Yes, you did."

Hoshi's brow creased suspiciously, and a single raindrop dripped from the end of her nose. "You didn't let me win, did you, Malcolm?"

He hesitated, numb mouth barely open, damp, icy air whistling through his teeth.

"Did you, Malcolm?" she repeated.

"I was pacing myself," he floundered.

Hoshi's tiny hand flashed forward, and smacked him on the arm sharply.

"Ow! Might I remind you it's an offence to strike a superior officer?"

"Well, you'd know all about being superior," she teased, and tapped him again, harder this time. Malcolm skipped lightly back out of range. He was chuckling softly as he palmed water from his eyes, and sprinted back into the tepid grey haze and speckles of violet light and the deep, damp woody aroma of the pocket beneath the trees.

He found Hoshi already huddled at the base of one great ashen-barked tree, her hands clasping her elbows and her bare feet stamping rhythmically in the mire. She was giving tiny, breathless giggles through the chatters of her teeth as he came back.

"Don't let me win next time," Hoshi said levelly, between heavy chatters.

"I won't if you don't hit me next time," Malcolm returned, with equal, perhaps even greater, civility. He ushered her back against the broad trunk with a wave of his hand, and placed himself between her and the rain, extending his arm instinctively across her as a shield.

"What are you doing, Lieutenant?" she asked, the amused tug of her mouth and her slender black eyebrows almost lost in the dark.

"Who?"

"You." She put her head on one side, her smooth coffee skin slick with water. "You've put yourself between the little lady and the nasty thunderstorm." She said this last with the guileless, pouting baby-voice of a child...but it was not a child's body that brushed against him in the dark, and whispered with the sounds of damp fabric as she moved.

"I'm your superior officer," he attempted weakly.

She nodded. "So you keep reminding me."

"No, I mean...it's my place to ensure your physical wellbeing during an away mission. Can't have you catching pneumonia."

Her smile widened, never quite breaking into a grin, hovering in the suggestive void between it and sinking back into the dark. "So...you're suggesting we share body heat?"

Malcolm swallowed, silently thanking the cold breeze for its dampening effect. The few drops that fell from the whispering leaves fell down the neck of his uniform and begn to cut icy swathes down his back. "That would be the logical course of action."

"Ah. And we must always have the most logical course of action," Hoshi teased.

He wondered what she meant by that.

Hoshi's warmth was suddenly against him, accepting his suggestion, and Malcolm felt his heart speed up. It rose from a steady, physically exerted pound to a hot, frantic patter that echoed in his skull and left a hateful, dry taste in his mouth. He closed his arms carefully around her shoulders, feeling hers come up around him, and wished, instantly, that he had never made the suggestion.

"It's bound to clear up soon," he said crisply, injecting into the awkward moment all the professional coolness he could marshal. "It's just a matter of waiting for the worst to pass and running for the shuttlepod. That's if I can remember where I left it in the dark." He was speaking softly, or as softly as the intermittent thunder would allow, but he couldn't understand why he should feel the need to keep his voice so low. There would be nobody, in this terrential downpour, to hear them.

"All right. Okay." She sighed, and Malcolm shivered as her breath fall warmly on his neck. "So," she continued, breathily, fighting for control of her chattering teeth, "what do we do to pass the time till then? Play I Spy?"

Malcolm laughed gently, merely an outrush of breath that crystallised on the frosty air. The feel of Hoshi's hands on his back was making him feel lamentably passive, even tender. And it frightened him. Hours later, with Hoshi gone, he would admit that the unaccustomed sensation, of being wanted, maybe even needed, had frightened him far more than the water had done.. "You start," he returned.

Hoshi brought her head up to look at him, the glowing paleness of her eyes like homing beacons in the darkness, and Malcolm had to fight not to make a sound. Earlier today he had found himself wishing the nervous, inexperienced Ensign would come back; now he was beginning to like the new, improved Hoshi Sato far better. Because she trusted him. This shivering bundle of warm, soft flesh trusted him. He would add 'innocent' to the list of shivering and warm and soft...but he was beginning to realise, too late, that it would be a lethal misconception to think of Hoshi as innocent.

"I spy with my little eye...I feel like such an idiot...something beginning with 'T'," she obliged.

"Don't feel like an idiot, Ensign. Treat it as an exercise in observational skills. And I think you're probably looking at 'trees'."

Hoshi sniggered, and he felt her shudder against him with suppressed mirth. "You're not going to let me win this time, are you?"

"Absolutely not. I spy with my little eye...something beginning with...'L'."

"Leaves."

Malcolm made a tiny growl in his throat before he could stop himself. "Something tells me I won't have to let you win, Ensign."

Hoshi rocked fractionally on her heels, trusting to his support to keep her balanced-as, he knew, she had been doing in silence and in less literal ways throughout this whole mission. "I spy with my little eye something beginning with...'H'."

Her eyes, the only point he could make out clearly in the lampblack darkness, roamed in slight, darting glances over his face; to his eyes, his mouth, his hair. Drinking in each, her gaze unflickering, her body straight but yielding in his arms. He thought it odd-and yet, not so odd-that she should be so trusting of him. She was a beautiful, smart, beguiling young woman, and he...

...well, it was no secret that his soft spot lie with the only form of companionship he had the stomach for. She should be nervous of him.

She was not.

Malcolm's hands slid, eloquently, along her back, placing one light, upward sweep across her shoulderblades as if plucking harp strings, removing his flattened palms, stroking upwards again. She leant into the caress, he was sure-but it was too slight, too silent, and a moment later he doubted that as anything more than his imagination.

"Warmer?" he asked. She nodded, her eyes never leaving his.

"Thank you."

Malcolm shrugged it away, his hands still moving in this prescribed pattern. "It's only my duty," he replied.

"No. I mean...for the past nine days. I couldn't have done it without you."

"What are you on about, Hoshi? Those people loved you. Watching you down here I can believe that Hoshi Sato gets whatever she wants. I barely put two words together for a whole week, and the one thing they did ask me to do..."

At last she looked away, down, and his hands slowed, hesitating momentarily before recovering their path and retracing their ponderous steps. "But I knew you were there, Lieutenant. There's always one, isn't there? One xenophobe, one troublemaker. No matter how nice the people are it's never entirely safe. Knowing you would take over if things turned bad...it was a safety-net. It was what I needed to just get on and do my job. Thank you."

He gave a short, breathy laugh that quivered as it left his mouth; but it was more of a sigh. "And to think I was convinced you wouldn't need security on a mission like this," he joked. "Pointless, I said. Send somebody with better diplomatic skills. But no, they had to insist. We don't know enough about the political climate down there, they said. There might be trouble." His fingers trailed up to the curve between shoulder and throat...and there they brushed against something soft and damp and heavy, snagging there like a fly in a web.

"Hair," he said, and his hands left her back to brush an errant strand from her face. "'H' is for hair."

"You're good," she chuckled. "Your turn."

Unhesitatingly, he murmured: "'L'. I spy something beginning with 'L'."

Hoshi's hushed voice cut back to him, muttering unclear words. "Lake?" she offered, hopefully.

"We can't see the lake from here. Not unless we're playing I Spy with my telescopic eye," he said flatly.

"Land?"

He shook his head. Hoshi humoured a small sigh of her own. "I give in," she whispered. "What do you see?"

Malcolm slid his right hand from her now feverishly cold body, indulging his fancy to let the fingertips strum across her ribs, and gently, very gently, he rested his thumb against her lips.

* * *

In his cell, the counter reached 00:47:00. Malcolm, with the phantom of her kiss still on his lips, hauled himself upright, and approached the console before he could change his mind.


	5. Chapter 5

She had turned her head in the palm of his hand, inclining her chin, giving her mouth to him; and, compelled by the hands at his back, Malcolm took what she offered. Her lips were warm and soft in contrast to the rain that pried goose flesh from his arms and streamed down his back in a chill torrent.

They parted when lightning split the sky and the rain on his senseless skin hardened to a downpour. Hoshi was the first to break it; her fingers curled caressingly around his neck, the nails combing through the finer hairs at the base of his skull, and then, with deceptive gentleness, she laced them through the locks as she had in the grass, and urged his head up to look at her. He went with it, surprised by the strength in those delicate hands, and enthralled by the way her eyes darted from his attentive face to the darkening sky above them. His brow creased in an involuntary frown.

"What?" he pressed.

"The rain. It's getting worse again."

Hoshi's other hand crept around his neck and overlaid the first, his head cradled helplessly in her palms, and he allowed the constraint in silence. He hated to be so physically restricted, unable to react quickly to danger—but something in the lack of self-consciousness behind her gesture made him submit to it. His whole body felt too sluggish, too blissfully heavy, to fight against even her. He swallowed, drawn to the way she watched the glide of his throat. "Is it?" he breathed. "I hadn't noticed."

"I noticed you hadn't noticed."

Malcolm sighed, and with great effort brought his hands up from her waist, laid them over hers where they rested...and then removed both his and hers from his neck. He resisted the urge that stole over him to lift her fingertips to his mouth and kiss them; he couldn't quite bring himself to believe, even with her eyes on him this way, that she would want to pursue this any further. It was an incident born of success, of elation, of a sort of drunkenness inspired by the beauty and openness of this planet. A pleasant memory to hold between them. Nothing more. He had dated his fair share of women, some far more forward than Hoshi, but none of them, not one, had progressed to something deeper than this brief clinch in the dark. A date here, a chance meeting there, it all amounted to the same; over time, through work and other obligations, they would meet less, speak less, and the relationship would die. Perhaps as they got to know him they didn't like what they saw, the initial charm worn thin and the reality too distant and obtuse to invest in.

Maybe he was inherently unlovable. He honestly didn't know anymore.

"We should get back to the shuttlepod," he said curtly. "This storm's in for the night. It might even get worse than this."

Hoshi nodded, reluctant to let him pull away. Malcolm made himself take a step back. "Lieutenant?" she said, softly. "We have two days off-duty when we get back to the ship. Remember?"

"Of course I remember, Ensign. After ten days on twenty-four hour duty the captain thought we might need the rest. I have to say I appreciate the consideration."

He saw Hoshi visibly flinch at the official address—but he wouldn't allow himself to feel guilty about it. He couldn't. He couldn't face her offering so much, only for it all to fall down like a house of cards in a breeze. "We should be going," he continued, and silently he couldn't help but admire the austerity of his own voice, the near tranquil severance of...whatever it was they had shared. It did not come easily to him.

Hoshi recovered admirably, that delightful wrinkle of her nose he had grown to recognise surfacing again with conscious effort, and Malcolm bit back a smile that would surely betray him. She had amazed him, beguiled him, bewitched him, made him forget everything for a few, precious minutes. She had even salved his bruised ego at the dismal failure to aid these people in their installation of an EM barrier around the city. With a touch on his back and a look that ignored all else, she had made him feel worthwhile.

That was why he had to end this, now. She was too good to waste on him.

"We could always beg some chestnuts from Chef," she offered, hopefully. "We won't have an open fire, but...well. It's a start."

"Hoshi..." His pretence caved at her quiet hopefulness, and he felt his voice slip back into its proper, acid propriety as the only defence he had left; but he was aware, even as he spoke, that he was pleading. Pleading with her to understand what he was trying so unskilfully to say. "You know the rules. You know I can't..."

"Fraternise," she ended for him. "I understand. After all...we wouldn't want to ruin your reputation, now would we?" He watched helplessly as she turned her back on him, and strode out into the night alone.

Experience, and painful experience at that, had taught him never to follow a woman when the discussion was so clearly terminated. Not when they had turned their back on him so deliberately, so consciously, as Hoshi did now. Had the choice been his, he would have left her to cool down before attempting to make further contact. But this was an alien planet, and out there she would be alone, not only in a healing sense, but in a very literal one. There was no crew out there to step in and fill his shoes if he didn't follow.

"Sometimes I wonder if you have any idea what you do to me, Ensign," he muttered, as her striding figure dwindled into the sheeting rain and cloud-shadows. "But I can't help but think you do it on purpose."

He trotted after her, lifting his feet out of the mud a little higher than usual, feeling it suck at his boots with every step, and skirted around her to block her exit. She halted, planting her hands on her hips, the gesture pinning the already clinging fabric to her tiny waist and accentuating every sweeping curve.

"My eyes are up here," she said, archly.

Malcolm obediently met them...but he flinched inwardly at the hurt he saw there.

"Hoshi..." he faltered. "That's not what I meant, and you know it." She met him only with petulant silence, a reaction which could not help but remind him, oddly, of just how young she was. The realisation only twisted the knife a little deeper. "Neither of us are thinking straight. It's been a long ten days and I, for one, don't know what I want. Why don't we just get back and work this out after we've had a decent meal and a good night's sleep? Things always make more sense in the morning."

Hoshi's head tilted on one side, but other than the steady blink of those huge dark eyes her face betrayed nothing that he could read. "What could you possibly be confused about, Lieutenant? You said it yourself. Ensign—Lieutenant. I don't see that there's anything else to discuss."

Cold and soaked to the bone, mud gracing their feet to the ankle and their clothes damped darkly to them like shrink-wrap, the two ventured from the cluster of trees into the rising storm, Malcolm slipping ahead to lead the way. Hoshi, he was both pleased and ashamed to acknowledge, was now allowing herself to be led, turning her face up into the rain, to the clouds darkening the sky and blotting out the stars. Thunder roared in the low dome and Hoshi skidded to a halt, startled. Malcolm reached blindly backwards in the dark and squeezed her hand, warningly, telling her there was no time to waste. He hadn't been joking about catching pneumonia.

The hillside stretching away so dark and foreboding to their right inevitably fascinated Malcolm, a morbid captivation he supposed, and despite his urgency he slowed enough to glance occasionally at the white-hot boil of moonlit cloud along the horizon, noting its stormlit intensity, drinking in the acidic taste of ozone in the air. It was a beautiful storm, and that, he knew, meant it would be deadly. He had see all too many of them before tonight.

On one of his snatched glimpses, lightning ignited the sky in one bright bolt, a silent flash swift on the heels of the thunder's roar, and Malcolm lurched to a halt, staring dumbly at the horizon line, waiting for the light to come again. Waiting to see if what he thought he saw was real.

Hoshi tugged him on, uselessly. She was mad at him, he knew, for his hesitance after he had chided her for the same; but despite her initial resistance he pulled her close by the soaked band of her neckline, his lips finding her cold, damp ear in the dark, and whispered:

"Did you see that?"

"No. What?"

Malcolm slowly dropped to the ground, pulling her down with him, and was encouraged when she took his warning, and fell to the grass with no protest. He did not take his eyes from the dark horizon. "Figures," he hissed. "Up there. On the hill."

Hoshi's bright eyes swept their surroundings ceaselessly. Malcolm silently nodded his approval; his old wariness and alert defence had returned to his own weighted body as if they had never been away. "How many?" she asked.

"I don't know. A lot. There were too many to count, and it was too fast to try."

Hoshi caught her breath sharply beside him, and for an instant Malcolm regretted being so abrupt—after all, she was still skittish, still frightened, in so many ways—but he didn't have the luxury of regret for long. She could handle herself. That there were untapped depths even Hoshi herself had not yet discovered, Malcolm was in no doubt.

"Are you sure?' Hoshi asked, tightly.

"Positive. They were lined up, Ensign. Lined up like an army."

"Like Zulu'?"

Malcolm nodded. "We're too far from the shuttlepod," he replied. "But the lake's only just over that ridge. It would provide cover. If we stay low, we should be able to make it."

"There's no way," Hoshi murmured. Her strengthless, terrified jitter was lost in the pounding rain and the rising, howling wind. "There's no way they didn't see us, Lieutenant. We're surrounded."

"No," he bit, and shook his head again. In this time his gaze never moved, waiting for the lightning. "No, not yet, they haven't seen us."

The lightning he waited for came; in the flat clap of searing white light, the ranks of figures stood silent and steadfast against the deepening, clouded blue of the turbulent night sky. Malcolm lost no time; the instant the landscape had darkened, he hauled Hoshi to her feet, and they ran.

* * *

He had not looked back, but he looked back now—looked back on the events that had, unknown to him at the time, worked a quite remarkable change. Before today he might have handled the choice he was called upon to make only minutes after that first flash of lightning quite differently. Instead all he could do was replay that bitterly compelling incitement from the cell that would, before the hour was out, steal all his motivation away.

0:49:00. Eleven minutes. It would be tight and it would be thoughtless, all higher brain functions locked away where they could not interfere, where his conscience could be silenced. It would be the shortest deadline he had ever worked to.

But it would be enough.

* * *

Malcolm bundled Hoshi unceremoniously over the brink of the lake's southern bank, taking no pains to be gentle with her this time. The rain had churned the dry summer dust into a mudslide, and she slipped as the uprooted rim crumbled away, fell hard on her thigh, and skidded into the water. The splash barely carried against the weather's violent throes.

Malcolm peered over the bank's edge, one eye on Hoshi and her precarious descent, the other drawn to the flat pewter shine of the water, opaque in this light, diamonds of rain kicking up from its leaden surface in cold mimicry of the stars they had watched together, only earlier tonight. Hoshi's bright eyes looked back up at him with quiet urgency, but he barely saw her. All he saw was the water, silent and dark with shadows like an open grave.

"Malcolm?" she stammered, at last. The name and the touch of her hand on his ankle startled him out of the trance, and he cast one final, sweeping glance from the depths below to the silvered rise of land above. Those figures were there, somewhere. Watching. With that in mind he slid, clumsily skidding on his heels and thigh with none of his customary grace, down the bank to her, and into the lake's chill embrace.

Hoshi's teeth were chattering once more, her face a pale smudge in the dark. The undercut bank to which Malcolm had guided them blotted out all but the palest starlight; the blinding moon had long since been lost in cloud.

A nervous laugh bubbled up in his throat, but he locked out all but the barest breath of it, expelling only a slight rush of air. "I can't believe it," he murmured—at least, it sounded little above a murmur, but in reality it was closer to a shout. "All that trouble to warm you up, and now your teeth are chattering again." He refrained from letting himself dwell too much on what that backsliding may entail, to set it right again. All that stood between them and pneumonia was each other, out here, and he resisted the powerful urge to cuddle her to him, and smooth the cold from her body with his palms.

He had been told, on more occasions than he could remember, that he was good with his hands.

Hoshi's gaze was unmoving, flickering over his face and leaving an imagined sensation of moth wings on the skin where her eyes alighted. Malcolm tore himself away from her and turned to survey the bank's brink, his ears strained against the downpour. It might be his imagination as that shiver in his cheekbones and his lips and the tips of his ears had been his imagination, but he thought the rain was lessening.

"Can you hear anything?' he demanded, softly. Hoshi shook her head. "No," she began; but then she stiffened, and her hand shot out to grasp his arm tightly. "Yes. Boots. On the rock over our heads."

Malcolm listened, and now, slow and ponderous and heavy enough to send tremors through the crumbling bank to them, he could make out the march of militant footsteps. Only one set, one soldier—but one was enough.

His mind was made up in an instant. "Hoshi," he hissed, urgently, and now it was he whose hands shot blindly out, clasping her shoulders, all semblance of tenderness gone. His fingers, to him, felt like steel pincers ploughing mercilessly into her soft flesh. "On three. Take a deep breath. Get as much air as you can."

Her stare sliced right through him, totally comprehending. "Aren't you afarid?' she asked, quite placidly.

"We don't have a choice," he breathed. "On three. One—two—three."

On his mark and before the word had fully left his mouth, both opened their lungs and drank in as much of the acidic air as they could hold before plunging down into the black water. Malcolm's heart jerked painfully in his chest as the cold wetness rushed up over him, his head completely submerged, the lightless depths a flurry of icy currents on his face and tugging at his body. Something brushed against him and he wrenched himself furiously away, twisting his sodden uniform into tangle as he thrashed. A gentle, but impatient, hand wound around his waist, and an arm circled his back, urging him forward. Malcolm's struggles quieted and he allowed himself to lean into Hoshi, feeling her there, treading water with him in a clumsy embrace.

She was an expert in communication, and her talent did not desert her now. Without her speaking, without his seeing, her message came through to him loud and clear.

I won't let you drown.

* * *

Malcolm closed his eyes, as much to fence away the glare of this cell's merciless light and the inimitable march of those numbers as to capture, for one precious moment, the feel of Hoshi's arms around him in mutual comfort. An anchor, a security then and an incentive now.

(I won't let you drown)

"Neither will I," he said, to a memory. "I won't let you die, Hoshi."

He took a shuddering breath that hastened the oxygen in and out of his lungs, as if his body rebelled against air provided by these monsters. It tasted...cold. Unreal. Then he opened his eyes, focused on the monitor, and began to punch the keys. Her face overlaid the screen, blurring sunspots that had yet to fade.

0:50:00.

He could do it.

He could do it—so long as he never allowed himself to think about what he did, ever again.

* * *

They exploded from below the lake's surface together, a tangle of wet clothes and goose fleshed limbs that clung together like limpets to a rock, and both breathed in deep lungfuls of the rain-soaked air gratefully. The soldier, as far as Malcolm could see or hear with water trailing down his face and with his ears swollen deaf, was gone.

He gasped raggedly, and smeared the drops from his eyes with his knuckles. Hoshi was treading water patiently beside him, her breathing steadying more easily than his, her arms still threaded loosely around his waist. It was with the same grim reluctance that he removed her comforting hands from him once more, but mourning the loss far more deeply. The enveloping sensation of cold black water was still too near; it had glided soft and gentle jaws around him like a liquid shroud.

Hoshi merely tipped her head in an oddly formal nod to him, and flashed a small, wavering smile that seemed oddly rigid on her face. It was all he could do to see her in the dark, but that smile had been plain, so they said, as the nose on her face. They were a team, and she trusted him to protect her and would herself protect him; but there was still much to be forgiven.

Instead of nodding back smartly as he might have done in less personal circumstances, Malcolm smiled gently. He let it remain only a moment before turning and kicking the one or two strokes back to the bank. Hoshi followed him, and both reclaimed their hold on the slick, rocky surface.

"Hear anything?" he demanded, softly.

"No. Do you think...do you think they've gone?"

Malcolm hooked both elbows over an outcropping of rock, and levered himself up to peer over the bank. "I wouldn't count on it," he muttered gruffly. "But I don't see anything."

It was at that moment, on a cue that could not have been achieved more accurately had it been choreographed in a play, that he did see; there was that one lonely figure, massive, armoured, pacing in measured strides across a patch of grass surely no more than twenty metres away. It was too dark and the rain came down too hard to see a face, an insignia, markings of any kind, and Malcolm had no way of placing the type of life form that studied the ground around it so religiously. He only knew he had never seen their kind before; the soldier marching a furrow in the turf must be at least eight feet tall, his limbs elongated and faintly bowed, giving an illusion of frailty and gauntness where there was none. Malcolm knew it would be a mistake to assume as much by this being's appearance and instead tried to judge his weight, his movements, the slumberous speed with which he walked .

The soldier stooped quite suddenly, and retrieved an item from the ground that was too small and distant for Malcolm to see at first. Then he recognised the object for what it was, and he felt the wall of calm he had so carefully constructed, the wall that had been considerably weathered by his immersion in the lake, implode as if his internal pressure could no longer match the force of the outer. Even the faint recognition that Hoshi may eventually forgive him for pushing her away like that did nothing to warm him.

It was a piece of charred firewood.

Eyes locked immovably on the alien soldier, following every twitch as if it were a personal threat, Malcolm walked his hand slowly to the right hip pocket of his uniform, reaching for the solid, cold comfort of the phase pistol he had charged and holstered there. The weapons had not been fully tested for water resistance since the laboratory preliminaries, but he had faith that it would still fire. Faith, not in some blind, unknowable force of luck, but in his own designs, his own profession, his own abilities. A clean stun should be enough to take the alien down, even given his monstrous size, and with this scout removed they could attempt to break cover and run for the shuttlepod. The ranks upon ranks of these aliens, though still a vivid memory, were only a distant threat.

Just one shot, if he played his cards right. One shot right between the shoulder blades, a short blast and no more. It should be easy. Malcolm slipped his fingers into his pocket...and there he froze.

His phase pistol had vanished. There was nothing in its place but empty air.

The soldier pitched the stick roughly away, and snatched a shrouded, unidentifiable weapon from his angular harness, from its shape a plasma rifle of some kind. Malcolm watched, captivated by this soldier as if watching a traffic accident not meant for his eyes; and that was when the creature suddenly turned, and looked straight at him.

He ducked, breathing hard as those weighted, deliberate footsteps approached once more, pensively pausing at every two or three. Malcolm seized the moment given him and scrambled the metre or so down the bank to where Hoshi's pale face and stricken wide eyes looked fearfully up at him.

"Down, down!" he hissed, clawing at Hoshi's shoulders as he landed in the water. She blinked at this vicious command, opened her mouth to speak, and closed it again; but she obeyed him, instantly. Her hands stole out and found his as they plunged down into the deep waters, and as it rushed into his ears and his world became that dark vacuum of silence and shadow for a second time, the sound of those footsteps was severed, and he heard nothing more but his own thumping heart.

* * *

Malcolm cleaved to Hoshi in their watery hideaway, his arms wrapped around her as hers wound around him—focusing all of his intent, all his will, on the feel of her, on the promise she gave. He resisted the urge, however strongly it came, to hold her any tighter than this, dared not allow himself the luxury despite his fear. He would rather release her entirely than risk dragging her down with him; but also, on a no less personal note but one far less excusable, he dared not allow himself to enjoy having her so close.

He pulled away from her as they surfaced again, disentangling himself from her wet clothes and comforting limbs and the long, sleek hair that had somehow laced itself around his neck. It was only now he noticed, quite without much care for it one way or another, that the rain had stopped.

Hoshi's eyes were a lambent glow in the dark, skating over his face in searchlight sweeps. The face they peered from remained composed, set...but expectant.

"What was that all about?" she demanded.

"He was still there. He found our fire." Malcolm palmed his plastered hair from his forehead, and shook his head dry briskly; any excuse, anything, if it meant he did not have to look at her.

"I thought you said there wasn't a life sign bigger than a bug for miles."

"There wasn't. I don't know where they came from." Still Malcolm refused to look at her. Her hands were suddenly in his hair again, with a strength that had clearly been suppressed the last time, and her interlaced fingers cupped his neck and forced his head up, urgently.

"Malcolm...what aren't you telling me?"

He shied back from the look she gave him, unable to assimilate what he saw there; frustration, annoyance...hope. Trust. She wanted him, maybe even needed him, to get them out of the situation he had placed them in. And what was worse...she believed that he could do it. Implicitly.

Malcolm had never felt so helpless in his life.

Hoshi sighed, and dragged one of her loosed hands across her nose with a sniff. "So...what? Lieutenant, you're supposed to be the tactical officer; what do we do?" She bit her lip, then, the first and only sign of fear she had given...and like the click of a phase pistol as the power cell was loaded, Malcolm knew that he could get her out of this. Safe, unharmed.

But alone.

"He knows there's somebody here," Malcolm murmured, more to himself than to Hoshi, though ostensibly for her benefit. "He found what was left of our fire. Possibly our footprints, although in this weather I doubt they'd last. And...and I think he saw me, just now when I looked over the edge. He won't leave until he has what he came for, not now."

The water rippled as Hoshi kicked her legs lazily to buoy herself up, shattering their reflected images into planetary rings. "How do you know that?"

Malcolm blinked. "Because that's what I would do."

"So...so what are you saying? That we're good as stuck here playing hide-and-seek?"

He shook his head, firmly. "They only know there's somebody here, Hoshi. I doubt our voices would have carried over the rain. That soldier has no way of knowing there are two people down here. Funny." He huffed quietly, without a trace of humour in what would otherwise have appeared to be a laugh. "Here was I, convinced you wouldn't be needing security on this planet. Looks like I was wrong."

"You wouldn't have been," she whispered back. "If I hadn't asked you to land today. I had no right to do that."

"And I had no right to agree, Ensign. But I did, and for better or worse we're here now. So let's just stop placing blame and face the facts." He pushed away from her and returned his attention to the bank, leaving Hoshi unanswered and unconsulted. That creature was up there, somewhere.

The simple hush that descended over the lake was broken, very gently as if in mocking parody of their shattered day trip, by only two things; the caressing lap of the stilled water against the undercut rock, and the measured labour of Hoshi's lungs as they worked. Malcolm could not hear his own because, as he gathered his wits, he realised he wasn't breathing at all.

Mathematics had never been his field of study, but there was a degree of calculation to any task involving weaponry, involving tactical manoeuvres, statistics and projected losses. This cold equation was simply a matter of logical arithmetic, and those numbers Malcolm understood all too perfectly.

"Hoshi?" he ventured, mutedly, one ear turned unconsciously towards her as he watched the pinnacle of the bank's black slope. There was an answering plash of water as she came closer to him to hear better, and Malcolm gratefully lowered his harsh whisper to an undertone. "Did you ever take basic tactical training at the Academy?"

"I don't think so. I did self-defence, but that's about it."

"Indeed. Listen; first-year Academy training in any tactical or weapons fields teaches the classic decoy manoeuvre. You're familiar with it?"

He caught a movement from the corner of his eye, and pivoted to see her shake her head apologetically. "I know the word, though, sir," she offered. "I don't need tactical training to know what that means."

He could hardly have missed her many layers of meaning had it been only half so vivid as it was. There was a quiver to her voice, an apprehension that she knew where the discussion would lead; but the bared steel of her direct eyes on him accused, opaquely enough, perhaps, but unmistakably. He had used more than one decoy tactic already tonight, and it had not gone unnoticed.

"Good," he continued, deliberately. "It's a simple enough equation, after all. That soldier is aware there's somebody down here; but it's unlikely he's given much thought to how many. I've worked with men like this, and he knows a single captive will earn him quite a few merit badges from his commanding officer. One or two makes little difference if that C.O. hasn't specifically expected that two be found. If we don't show soon, that soldier is going to come down here looking for us. On the other hand if one of us is located up there it's unlikely he'd think to look for a second down here." Malcolm took a deep, faltering breath, knowing this was where her protests would begin. The staid intractability of his own voice barely sounded his, sounded steady and assured...but this was Hoshi. She would see through that disguise as if it were made of glass.

She said nothing. Her face, cool and coldly grey in the dense web of shadow, seemed cast in marble. The only movement, all but eclipsed in the dark, was an errant twitch of her top lip, threatening a nervous smile.

"Did you know that in Klingon the words for 'decoy' and suicide' have the same root?" she murmured, at last—and there was her protest, unspoken but not unmade.

Finally Malcolm turned completely to face her, abandoning his careful lookout, the water swelling darkly around his waist. She was shivering again, her arms wrapped tightly around her upper body, her hands tucked into her sleeves and clasped firmly under her arms.

"Share body heat?" he ventured, with an anxious half-smile.

He had closed the space between them before she could resist, weaving his arms around her shoulders, drawing her in. She went, her crossed arms pinned between her chest and his; and although Malcolm regretted the absence of those small hands on his back, he was grateful. At least this way, clearly dominant and making some show of being control, he could imagine that he knew what he was doing.

"Nonsense, by the way," he said, dismissively. "Suicide is about as dishonourable as a Klingon can get." He felt her laugh breathlessly into the nape of his neck, the slight outrush chilling as it struck his damp skin, and smiled to himself bitterly. It was only the second time he had held her, had held any woman, this way, and a part of him almost knew, in a way that was near precognitive, that it would also be the last. He squeezed her gently before he even knew what he did. "I appreciate the effort," he conceded. "Trust me, Hoshi, it's an old trick. The oldest. The odds of a decoy sustaining any serious injury is fairly remote." About one in three, to be exact. "I know when you're lying," she returned, her voice unjudging and placid and muffled against his shoulder. It was the sound of a woman who wanted to believe she was safe. "Your cheek twitches. It's involuntary."

Swallowing back the confession in his throat, Malcolm let go of her and took a step back, his feet slipping on the rocky bed. As before, Hoshi's eyes followed him where he wandered. "I'll remember to work on that."

"Malcolm, surely you don't think..."

He only stared her down, perfectly impassive, resisting every motion she made towards breaking his control. He did think. In fact, it was worse than that.

He knew.

"It's our best chance, Hoshi," he said, very softly. "Give me a moment to get his attention and then run for the shuttlepod and call for an emergency beam-out the second Enterprise is in range. Just keep going straight to two o' clock and you should find your way. If I'm still in range of the transporter, then...well, then nothing's been lost."

Hoshi was now the one that swallowed, quite brutally shifting the lump in her throat. He found himself watching the movement, returning the favour, lacking the courage to raise his eyes any higher. My eyes are up here, she had said. It wasn't as simple as that.

"What if you're not in range?" she put to him, even, and unsettlingly distant. "What if we can't get a lock on you or...or you've already been beamed somewhere else?"

Malcolm at last took his eyes away completely, unable to bear the faint hope he saw there, the desperate insistence for a promise he couldn't give. He couldn't tell her the real concern, though he knew she was neither so blind nor so innocent to fail to see it for herself; although he said captive, to placate her, to fool her, to fool himself, he knew the word was only one option of the two that lay before him if he went ahead with this.

There may not be any human biosigns left for the Enterprise to find by the time they started looking for him.

"If you can't lock onto me...then I'll just have to escape some other way. I do have some experience in these matters, you know." He smiled ruefully, drawing a weary imitation from her. "Be back at the landing site in twelve hours. I'll be there."

Silence. "Your cheek's twitching again," she said.

There was that hush again; only this time, to Malcolm's ears, his own breathing overrode all else. "It doesn't change anything, Hoshi. We could stay down here, and hide for as long as you think you can hold your breath, and maybe Enterprise will send somebody to come looking for us. They might even think to use the transporter themselves. But that alien up there isn't going to stand and wait for us to come out forever. He'll come after us, and once he's seen you, it will be too late for plan B, in fact too late for anything. We have to do something now."

She pressed her finger to his still murmuring lips, quieting him before he could intercept her. Shaking, he took her hand gently away as he had so many times tonight. "Please," he begged, and with that word every effort he had made to belittle this plan, to underplay its danger and brass out his fear, collapsed on a breath. It wasn't working, and would never work, on someone so inherently cautious as Hoshi. "Don't make this any harder for me. I'll be all right so long as I don't...so long as I stay focused. This is my responsibility, all of it. I should never have allowed this landing party, and I should never have suggested that fire. This whole day was a mistake, my mistake. I won't let you pay for my mistakes."

This time, Hoshi apparently thought better of touching him. Though Malcolm had encouraged that restraint, he regretted, quite suddenly, that it should have caught on so soon. "Do you think I don't know why you're doing this, Malcolm? This isn't Lieutenant Reed speaking; I know you haven't hesitated in the past to jump in and take the flack for any one of us...but this isn't about duty. Is it?"

"Of course not," he conceded, reluctantly. "I'm not a total lemming."

Those eyes were on him again, lancing through his, prying his thoughts from his head as a knife would lever apart loose bricks. He had always imagined himself a little like the Great Pyramid in that respect, with no chink wide enough to insert even the thinnest blade between the stones; but he had never allowed for the complete lack of artifice that was Hoshi Sato. "Then why?' she pressed, tenderly. "I've seen you watching me, Malcolm. When you didn't think I'd notice, when my back was turned. Lieutenant Reed would never have landed here today; but Malcolm might. If he wanted to make me happy. And the fire; I even think Malcolm would have taken that swim if I'd pressed him. So the fact is that today didn't feel like a 'mistake' to me. So I have to wonder...which one is making this decision?"

Now, as she looked at him, there were tears lying dormant and ready to fall in her eyes. Malcolm reached out a numb hand at last, and cupped her neck in his palm as she had done so many times for him, only today. "Are you angry with me, for...for taking advantage? After all, I did take every opportunity to get you alone. Weren't you nervous? Or mad as a Klingon with a headache at me for having the nerve?"

She laughed, painfully. "I'm angry with you for being such a melodramatic jerk," she breathed. "So the question remains—why do you have to do this at all? And why you? I'm every bit as expendable as you are."

"You're not, Hoshi. There are any number of people onboard that can do my job, but there's none come close to you. It makes sense this way."

There was a mutinous silence. "I wasn't talking about our jobs. Tell me the real reason, Malcolm, or I'll scream. Then your plan won't mean a thing."

Malcolm tightened his hold and pulled her closer, bringing his mouth to her ear until his lips tickled her lobe as he spoke. He whispered the answer and felt her twist her fingers, briefly, in his uniform; and without a further word, without looking back, Malcolm climbed the bank, and stepped into the unknown.

* * *

His fingers halted on the keys at that phantom touch of her ear against his lips, a ghost that passed like a breeze and was gone. He had been a jerk, for want of a better word. He had given her signals only to withdraw them again, had frozen her out in cowardly self-defence. But at least, with that brief last whisper, he had not left her without an apology, without righting the greatest mistake he had made that day.

The memory of all that came after was hazy, at best; he remembered surrendering to that silent silhouette against the waxing moonlight, remembered being dragged by his hair out onto the hillside. He remembered that impenetrable wall of black armoured bodies, and being bundled into a hulking metallic hover vehicle that towered above him like a man-made monolith. Once, he thought, he might have broken away and tried to escape; the only real recollection he had of that encounter was the sharp crack of a rifle butt across his face and the agonising smash of his knuckles as he lashed out against a helmeted head, knocking the soldier to the ground. Malcolm was sure he must have fallen soon after under that same rifle butt, the first blow enough to stun his wits out of his head and blot out the rest. Beaten into submission—for a time, at least.

Still there was blackness where the rest should be. Although the majority of the day's events had risen from a lifeless trickle until they crowded in on him, pushing from all sides, he remembered nothing of the journey here at all. Maybe they had drugged him, to prevent him from attempting escape again. Whatever the case—until the fractured images of waking in that vehicle's blazing debris, the dream he had been visited by even here, there was nothing.

Hoshi. There was Hoshi.

Yes, there had been Hoshi, stark in the sea of lost minutes, lost hours. There had been that curdling scream, heard from a distance as he lay trapped in the wreckage.

Despite it all, he couldn't help now but smile, inwardly. He had heard that scream only once before, but the squeal she sometimes gave; with that, he was well acquainted. Early on in this ten-day mission they had been exploring a marketplace, a pleasing dichotomy of rustic scents and sounds and sights in crystal contrast to the sleek modern beauty of the buildings round about. Technology and nature blended so seamlessly, so effortlessly, on this planet. They had been passing by a community garden where a sprinkler system rotated endless spirals of moisture over the cultivated lawns, and atypically he had succumbed to an almost frightful urge; he had reached out a hand as they passed, and tilted one of the sprinklers straight at Hoshi. She had responded in kind, soaking them both in the crossfire. And a little girl nearby, one Hoshi had had occasion to meet before that day, had witnessed their playful cussing and asked Hoshi if he was her boyfriend. At least, that was what Hoshi had said the girl asked...

Malcolm looked back at the blueprints on-screen, tracing the fine lines of the aerial view with his fingertips, the smile gone from his face. This city suburb, this target, looked so much like the downtown streets they had strolled through that day—so much like the market, the gardens, the bunker where most of his failed experiments to stabilise their prototype EM barrier had taken place and come to nothing.

That was it. That was why these aliens wanted this target, this largely civilian target it now seemed, destroyed—they wanted to rob the city of its one greatest budding defence, a fully-encompassing, stable electromagnetic barrier. Why was not for him to know, it appeared, a feud perhaps too old to be explained. Most feuds were.

What on earth did he think he was doing? This was a civilian population, people he had met, people he had known...

...but Hoshi...Hoshi was someone he might have loved.

"I'm sorry, Hoshi," he murmured, to himself, to her memory, he didn't know.

He stared, unseeing, as the counter that had tormented him for the past hour flickered from 0:59:59 to 0:01:00; and then his hands slid, lifelessly, from the console.

He left them in his lap where they fell.


	6. Chapter 6

Silence played into shadows, and amazingly he slept; awkwardly, painfully, finding no rest in it. He accepted the darkness as it swept over him, oblivion melting the scars away. Even the silk touch of that black lake had not felt so much like death as this waiting.

Perhaps he wanted it that way; perhaps it was no coincidence that his dreams were of water, of sinking into silence, into darkness...at first caught up in Hoshi's arms, wrenched away at the last. A moment of promise, snatched away.

He could taste her still, could sense her in his head like a rushing wind...but there was nothing left of her to touch. He had lost his grip on her, and reality had flooded back in to fill the space she left.

He must be losing his mind.

Malcolm drifted, liking the emptiness, losing himself in it. He had slipped to the floor as he slept and his dreams were punctuated by the gnaw of a twisted neck, the sting of a numbed limb...but what did he care? Pain only gave him something else to focus on. It would fade. There were some things that never would.

It was sound which woke him, a sensation sorely missing in his quiet delirium and which struck like a hammer on the fragile bell of his skull. Every part of him felt cramped, a bruised, syrupy sluggishness orbiting him as he dragged himself upright and smudged a rough fist across his tired eyes. Across dry eyes.

"Malcolm?" that sound came again. He froze, a statue made of ice; wanting to thaw, but unable to accept the tiny flame turned on him. Despite the heat of the room, heat which had slowly built, airlessly crushing in on him, sending him into half-willing sleep, Malcolm shivered.

It was Hoshi's voice. Not a recording, a robot, a facsimile; but a living, breathing Hoshi.

"No," he whimpered, tunefully. Then, with greater strength, with rising anger at this farce they still clung to like tattered seaweed to an old ship's hull, he demanded: "What do you want now? More blood for medical research? How about all the codes to Enterprise? Whatever trick you're playing, it won't work. Do you think I don't know? Do you think I don't know she's dead? You're not Hoshi, why pretend otherwise? Believe me when I say that you have nothing left to bargain with. Go ahead and kill me now because I'm about as much use to you as a corpse at this point in time anyway. Come on! I won't fight. Easiest kill you ever had." He hung his head at last, and his voice dropped to a husk of its former self, a shadow, a glimmer of pain beneath the bravado. "Except for Hoshi," he whispered. "She was no threat to you."

"Malcolm?"

Malcolm closed his eyes, fists unconsciously fastening in the folds of his shirt, his slick back pressed to the wall, trembling softly. He didn't know when he had become this shivering wreck, but it had happened, it seemed, like the snap of a brittle piece of charcoaled firewood. Suddenly. It had begun with the slide of his hands from that console, and ended as they hit his lap. He felt untethered from the world.

He pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and dropped his face into the dark cradle. It was only a voice, be it in his head or on a disc; it didn't mean anything but that he was hearing things, what he wanted to hear, what he wanted to be real. Maybe he was speaking to nobody but himself.

"Malcolm, it's me." Whatever it was that said those words, it sounded frightened. It sounded like Hoshi, anxiety radiating through the unspoken spaces between. "Talk to me. Please, Malcolm, I'm so scared."

"You're dead, Ensign," he told his knees. "So I can't be talking to you." He laughed breathily into the fabric of his combats. "That would make me crazy. I'm not crazy."

There was a silence. Maybe the aliens were tired of torturing him. Or, maybe, his usefulness was not at its end, after all. He waited, unaware until the silence broke just how much he had been dreading that voice speaking again; he had been braced as if for a blow, but the expectation did nothing to ease its coming.

"Malcolm Reed, I appreciate that you're the most paranoid guy ever to leave Earth, and I don't blame you for being so cautious. It's one of the things I..." And there the voice dwindled, falling into a soft breath that echoed like a dark wind in the amplifiers. "I know you probably don't believe it's me, but I swear if you don't talk to me soon, then you'll wish it wasn't. I mean...you have no idea how much I've wanted to hear your voice. Please, Lieutenant, talk to me. It's only your duty."

He wanted to laugh, but nothing came. There was nothing but a terrifying blankness where words should be, and he grasped for anything, whatever came, and blurted out: "Now, now, Ensign. Don't you know it's an offence to threaten a superior officer?"

She chuckled softly over the hidden speakers, and Malcolm found himself joining her, without mirth. It was a release. Nothing more.

"They thought I could change your mind," she breathed, with a twist of bitter amusement as the laughter subsided. The intercom sizzled with static that leapfrogged across his nerves like live sparks. "They decided to let me talk to you one last time, for real. I think they thought I could convince you." There was a sniff, amplified by the speakers, one tear swelling deceptively until it sounded like a river. "And you know what? I don't think I have it in me to argue with them. I meant to tell you to stand your ground. To...to refuse. But I can't."

Malcolm's head snapped up at that, as if there was anything but these walls to look at, or this blind light to stare back at him. "The real Hoshi would never say that," he spat. "It was a good try, whoever you are. But you don't fool me so easily. You're right about one thing, though: I am paranoid."

"It's me, Lieutenant," she whispered, cracks in her voice shooting outwards from the centre like breaking glass. "It's me, and I'm saying it. I have to. Ask me a question, any question. Something I would know, something they couldn't know. I'll prove it to you."

He buried his face again, hiding from what his head knew and what his heart believed; that this was Hoshi, and that it wasn't. That he was imagining dreams and nightmares in one evil mess. That she might be alive...and that she might, despite all he wanted to believe, say exactly what she said now. "What's my favourite food, Ensign?" he said, weakly."You should know that one." "Pineapple. Next time ask me something easy." There was a strain to her voice that hadn't been there before, a strain so human and so very, very frightened that it, rather than her plaintive reply, convinced him. She was real. Alive.

But she was asking the impossible of him, and that, in the face of all the facts, felt as unreal as the rest of his stay in this coffin. "Hoshi, please don't cry," he said, pathetically.

"Is that your way of trying to play nice? Or doing your duty as my superior officer?" Even now, there was a hint of a smile to the way she baited and teased him and cornered him. Only somebody that felt something for him could smile with their voice that way. He found it as hard to accept as accepting Hoshi's voice itself...but that didn't make it any less true.

"It's my way of stopping myself from joining you," he chuckled, feebly. The fingers of his left hand twisted restlessly in his hair as if it were somehow responsible for all of this, but he barely noticed. Except that that was what she had done, in the rain. She had tangled her hands in his hair. "I thought the worst was over," he said, blankly. "Looks like I was wrong. What are we going to do, Hoshi?"

"I was hoping you could tell me," she tried to joke. "You always seem to know what to do."

His face creased unwillingly, against the disquiet boiling inside of him or because of it, he didn't know. He didn't know very much of anything anymore. "I wish they'd just tortured me," he said, out of the blue. His voice had returned to its usual, obliquely calm tone, but it had sunk now into a level of quietude and humility that felt quite alien coming from his mouth. Shock, it seemed, had rendered him docile. "Why didn't they?"

"They're not like us, Lieutenant," her voice murmured in reply. "I've spent some time with them; they needed me to translate their language. These beings...I don't think they feel physical pain, and they heal almost instantly. I've seen them. Although they've learned enough of humans to know that hitting us keeps us in line, they don't understand. They don't understand that pain is unpleasant for us or that sometimes we bargain to avoid it."

Malcolm smiled grimly to a cell without eyes to see the sadness in it. "They might not know much about physical torture," he sighed, tightly. "But they certainly mastered the psychological kind." He scuffed his feet carefully on the cell's floor, considering them uncomfortably hard. He found he could concentrate on her voice, on her words, looking down this way. "How have they treated you?"

"Better than you," she said. Her voice, all he had of her here, was dry as windblown ashes. "So you can stop worrying. I'm all right." Silence. Then, quietly: "You must be starving."

With a taut smile and his hand tightened depreciatively at the nape of his neck, Malcolm confessed: "I hadn't really noticed. Forgive me if I haven't noticed much of anything for the past hour."

"I'm sorry. I know my being stupid enough to get caught spoiled all your plans."

"It did tread on my toes a bit." The ease of their conversation was a sham, deathly predicaments spoken as if they were nothing more than small talk over dinner; both knew it. It seemed that neither cared. "How long do we have?"

"Long enough, I think."

"Are they listening?"

"They might have bugged your cell. You know to be sure. I'm pretty certain they're more advanced than us in a lot of ways, and they've been studying everything I say for hours now as if they almost understood it. I wouldn't be surprised if they were taking all of this down." She sighed. "Pretty soon they won't need me to translate their messages to you anymore."

For a moment, Malcolm's curiosity overrode his apathy. "But why record your voice?"

In other circumstances, Hoshi might have displayed an almost childlike excitement over the news she delivered next; but as it stood, she sounded only weary, and surprised that he had asked. "They don't have vocal cords, Lieutenant. I think they must communicate among themselves by telepathy or some other device I haven't discovered yet. They have a written language I was able to translate some basic phrases from, but it's not much."

"But why record you? Why not just let you talk to me?" He knew he sounded almost desperate; the memory of that cold inhuman Hoshi, offering him the worst ultimatum of his life, echoed still in his ears. The idea that it had been some bizarre new form of psychological torture refused to leave him be...and the distant thought that he had been denied this contact with her, this brief but human contact, left him hollow with a voiceless black rage he had never felt before today.

"They wanted to monitor me," she said, lifelessly. "And they didn't want me to know what was being said. You know, that...that they intended to use me as the hostage. I figured it out anyway." For a moment, just a moment, she sounded terrifyingly close to that selfsame, twisted recording.

But he knew he would never tell her that.

Malcolm smashed his fist into the floor beside him. "That's what they've been doing all along!" he yelled, not caring if he startled her, or if she mistook his self-loathing for anger at her. "Monitoring us, of course! The planet...they were watching."

He ran out of words as the full import of that brutal truth hit him; they had been watching. They had wanted the armoury officer, they had wanted the linguist, and had captured both; but by watching, by waiting, these aliens had learned far more of use than merely their identities. How could he have been so stupid as to play into their hands, feeding them incentives that would guarantee his attention?

They had seen he and Hoshi, among the trees, in the rain, stealing a moment thought to be secret. He had let his guard down, and it may yet cost them their lives. "We're both dead anyway, Ensign," he said, far more coldly than he had intended. "You know that, don't you?"

"No. And you can't, either. They told me...they told me they would let us both go, if we do as they say. We have no reason to believe they won't keep their word."

He laughed, bitterly. It was beginning to feel like a second voice, the pained smirk a second face, the one he showed when his real facade failed him. "Now whose cheek's twitching? Wise up, Hoshi. If I refuse this time, they'll...they'll kill you. Then they'll torture me. Like you say, they know to hit us to keep us in line, even if they don't understand why. Believe me, they'll learn. And it will only be a matter of time before they track down Enterprise, and threaten me with all of their deaths the way they're threatening me with yours."

There was a silence. "I wasn't suggesting you refuse, Lieutenant. You know I wasn't. And you know why, or you think you do. Just remember you're not the failure you think you are. Not with me, not with...anything." Her voice was unbreakably calm, perfectly even...and ready to crack like ice in water at any moment. "I don't want to die without the chance to beg those chestnuts from Chef." She sniffed, and again the tiny sound thundered in the amplified speakers. "Malcolm, listen, I don't have long, I can hear them coming back. Please, do this one thing for me."

"You're asking me to fire on thousands of people," he murmured, his voice failing to come. He couldn't believe what he heard, what she asked of him, that she would be willing to trade this way. It went against everything he believed in...and everything he believed about her.

And maybe it was supposed to. Maybe he did know why she asked the impossible of him. You're not the failure you think you are. Nobody had ever said that to him before.

"It's your decision, Ensign," he said, suddenly docile to her request. Conceding, in the turn of a second, to her wishes...and letting her know as much. For some reason he could not fathom, it was the ceiling he addressed. "If it's what you think I should do."

"It is," she breathed, a hush on a still air. Malcolm almost smiled, genuinely this time. It was what he had expected her to say, now that he understood. "Remember how we played I-Spy, Lieutenant?" Her voice was low with muted and darkened intimations.

"How could I forget?" he purred, a shiver tracing his spine with invisible fingers at the memory.

"I think in the end you'll have to agree I won."

His mouth had gone dry as he teased her just this little bit further, warm with sudden peace, bouncing her bait back at her. If she was right, then she had won in almost every way he could imagine. "Did you? I hadn't noticed."

"I noticed you hadn't noticed. Listen, I have to go, I'm sorry. Remember what EM stands for, Malcolm. Remember. For me."

With a crackle of static and a hard pulse of feedback, she was silent. He was alone once more. And, alone, Malcolm turned and faced the console that had threatened to steal his life.


	7. Chapter 7

There was an impression of dampness, of heat and heavy breathing and exploring hands in a fog of indistinct sound, scents, and images. It was dark, but he saw flashes of her, like snapshots mounted on a black gallery wall—snatches of skin, of hair, vague notions of leaves all around. Here and now, she was alive, and warm, a soft, breathing bundle against him. Here and now she was touching him with gentle whispers of her hand across his skin like rain, and he didn't push her away.

Her hands clasped his neck, cradling his head in that oddly mothering way she had, her flexing fingers spread through his hair. All else was hasty, frantic, blurred—but this one sensation, at least, was as bright and real as anything Malcolm had ever felt.

Light flooded into the darkness, a white horizon widening to a vista, and he realised he was waking up, though he didn't remember sleeping a second time; but that touch at his neck, his vulnerable, unprotected neck, refused to fade along with the rest of his dream.

He opened his eyes, flinching at the hateful glare...and had made a startled, kittenish sound in his throat before his shattered reserve even knew he was awake. But he couldn't be awake. He couldn't be alive. The apparition before him, looking down on him with anxious liquid eyes and framed by ragged ribbons of uncared-for black hair, couldn't be real.

"Hoshi?"

He ran his tongue nervously over his teeth, tasting the stale, dry taste there; the name felt heavy in his mouth. Heavy, and alien. Malcolm could only drag himself a little from the floor, careful not to disturb her supporting hands, and drink in every detail of her mascara-smudged face.

"I probably don't look my best," she said, with an awkward smile. "But you don't look so hot, either."

His hand crept out, reaching for her arm, catching in the folds of her uniform. He had been so afraid, for an instant too endless to cast lightly aside, that he would go straight through her like Japanese steel through silk. The flesh under his palm was instead solid, warm, and real. Perfectly real. He felt for her elbow, her shoulder, neck, face...and the initially gentle movements became a frantic investigation, the tests a need for comfort, and within moments he was holding her tightly to him. Her body, at first rigid with surprise, quickly softened against him and moulded itself to his shape.

"You...you did it?" she asked, breathing the question against his earlobe. The rush of heat made him shiver—but he didn't push her away.

"Yes, I did it. For better or worse, Hoshi, I did it."

He felt her gulp, and disentangled himself enough to look at her face. She was perfectly inscrutable, a mask of exquisitely complex emotions threaded one beneath another like the weave of a fabric. He supposed what he saw most prominently said more about himself, and his guilt, than it did about her.

"Good. Then you can tell me about it once we get out of here." She pulled insistently at his arm, and Malcolm smiled woozily to see her small frame struggling to haul his entire weight up without his intercession. He went where she pulled, shakily, swaying a little as he clambered to his knees. He resisted as Hoshi braced an arm around his shoulders, hooked his over her neck, and started to half-drag him to the door on their knees. Whatever that gas had been, it had shattered his hand-eye co-ordination, and although he made an effort to accept a little of his own weight, still he had to rely on her to bear the brunt of it. He couldn't help but smile at that, albeit grimly. Malcolm Reed wasn't used to taking orders from this slip of an ensign.

She hauled him out into a hewn rock corridor, and, wrapping both slender arms around his waist, pulled him to his feet and steadied him. Had he been a little more aware, he might have started at this raw corridor; after so much metal, so much tasteless recycled air and those awful glaring lights, he had expected a complex characterised by the same; a ship, perhaps, or a bunker in those distant, hazy mountains he had seen from the shuttlepod what felt like an eternity ago. This may well be those mountains still; but if so, then it was not in them, but under them. His eyesight was blurred and the walls were little more than a smudgy brown impression of height to either side, but the support of Hoshi's arms around him, quivering a little with the strain, were a solid, tangible anchor in a misty world of half-seen things and half-heard noises.

He was suddenly aware that she was speaking, and channelled every ounce of his concentration to the sound of it; an urgent whisper, then a louder one, never daring to raise above a murmur. But for the longest time, he couldn't make out what she was trying to say.

She was tugging again, this time not to bring him to his feet, but to urge him to his right, away from the cell. A part of him wanted to turn one last time, a defiant last glance, a mocking goodbye to that hateful box of metal and light and distorted voices like the call of drowned men at sea. But his head refused to move. "This way," she panted, and this time, hearing what she tried so hard to say to him, he followed her lead.

They staggered on down identical corridors for what felt like forever, but since his every impression of time had been lost—had been stolen from him—in that cell, the specifics meant nothing, and it may have only felt that long. In reality it couldn't have been; Hoshi was barely out of breath when they finally came to a halt, despite having dragged him so much of the way.

"In here. Quick," she whispered, and Malcolm felt himself shoved behind a natural angle of rock which had not been smoothed when the corridors were hacked out of the mountain. She followed him, pressed close enough to send her heartbeat through him, and leave her sweat on his skin. Sometime in the past day and night she had pushed up her sleeves and tied her uniform top up to her midriff in the front; clearly his cell had not been the only one to suffer from excessive heat. He might have wondered if these beings functioned in different temperatures to humans, in other circumstances, and if his wits had still been his...but as he focused all he could think of was the pattern of Hoshi's heartbeat, and the way his had begun to regulate to it. Almost as if she kept him functioning when his every instinct was to sleep.

"Did you hear something?" he forced, not hearing his own voice except as a distant murmur that seemed to come from very far away. Then, catching the way her face tilted to him with girlish amusement, he added: "Stupid question."

"Yes. Ssh."

Malcolm straightened himself against her and held his breath in check until the footsteps Hoshi had heard so much earlier than he had—boots marching, frighteningly like the ones he had imagined—had neared, swelled, and passed by. He felt her sigh out what she had held in her lungs, and she tremored against him in the tight space. If Malcolm had been even a tiny bit more aware, he might have found it distracting. Or worse—he might have been so blinded by rage at what these creatures had done to him and fear at what they may have done to Hoshi that he might have charged out after the invisible soldiers and finished what he should have done when they first sighted that figure in black armour, what felt like years ago to him now.

"It's safe to go," Hoshi hissed. "I'll just..." Malcolm halted her with a hand on her arm, and although weakness and insensibility permeated his every muscle, an unexpected urgency flowed through his fingers and made them grip harder than he had meant them to.

"Wait, Hoshi," he said, powerlessly. She looked at him with real surprise in her eyes—red eyes, he now noticed. Maybe that was the fundamental difference between them, the one thing he couldn't believe she would ever accept of him; she was able to cry. "How...how did you find me? I mean...they didn't let you go, did they?"

"No." There was a ripple in her sleek bronze cheek, as if all her teeth had tightened at the word. "You were right about that, they're not trustworthy and they weren't going to let us go." Then she smiled, and Malcolm lost what little sensation still remained in his vital organs. "Lucky for us they're pretty dumb as well."

His lips moved to form some kind of a question. She stilled them with a touch, and a shake of her head, and a tilt to her eyebrows which T'Pol would be actively jealous of should she ever see it. Vulcan or not, she would be jealous. "They left their recording equipment in my cell," she explained. "It seems they're dumb—in both senses of the word—but they're not deaf. I played my voice on it and when one of them came in to finish me off I hit him with my boot. You remember I was carrying them? I don't think he'll be out long, but it was long enough for me to run."

"You're amazing," he murmured—and for that moment, despite the faint certainty that more soldiers would follow and every second wasted was an opportunity lost, he couldn't take his eyes from her. "That's one decoy tactic we were never taught at the Academy."

She smiled. "I know."

And they were off again, Hoshi leading the way.

* * *

The moment he first heard it, everything fell into place. He understood why the corridors were of bare rock, why the air tasted natural still and not the processed metallic fake he had breathed in the cell, and why Hoshi seemed unconcerned about their means of escape. They wouldn't need to steal a shuttle or hack into the communications systems for an emergency beam-out, so long as their arms and legs worked and they didn't mind a little exertion. And he understood, suddenly, why their crew mates had been apparently unable to find them, even with Enterprise's most powerful sensors on overtime.

"This leads out to the waterfall, doesn't it?" he asked her, after they had run silently and falteringly for some metres. But before she could reply, the noise deepened to a thunder, and as they rounded a corner into darkness and spray alighted on his skin like kisses, he was answered. Weak moonlight filtered through the curtain of water and cast gunmetal shadows and shuddering ripples across the floor, the walls, the ceiling...and Hoshi's anxious, flushed face, pale beneath the rosy haze of exhaustion colouring her cheeks. All the fire had drained from her in the instant that the waterfall came into view. She must know what his reaction to this little surprise would be. And be afraid of it.

"This is the way they brought me in," she said, softly, not looking at him. The unlit cavern was too dim to see if it was with regret or with muted force. "Their vehicle crashed, you know, with you in it, and I thought..." She sighed, tearing air from her lungs as if it were poisonous to her. "I thought if I made a noise—distracted them—you could get away. So I screamed. Led them right to me."

"I was unconscious," he replied. That scream, that scream he had been so annoyed at her for giving, that sound that had echoed even into his uneasy dreams...it hadn't been the shriek of a girl too frightened or too inexperienced to know better. It had been the decoy of a woman who knew all too well what she did. "A part of the vehicle fell on me, and that's all I remember."

"All you remember? Then you didn't hear me scream and think I was the sort of wet-eared ensign that was too young to know better?"

He said nothing. He couldn't deny it all to this walking lie detector. Instead, taking his eyes away from her and scouring the greasy light and granite dark of the cave floor, he asked: "How can you even bear to look at me, Hoshi?" he said, disguising as a question the rhetoric he expected no real answer to. "I was going to let you...I mean, when that hour was over I had no way of knowing they wouldn't...I nearly killed you, Hoshi. Would have done, if they hadn't..." And there he hesitated, his mouth suddenly dry. He couldn't bring himself to say a word more. Not when...not when she had gotten herself caught for him. No matter how much easier things might have been had she not, had he been captive without that kind of hostage; it took nothing away from what she had done.

Hoshi brought a hand up and ran her fingers through his hair, softly bristling the unruly, sweaty locks aside. "What were you supposed to do? You had no way of knowing they wouldn't kill us both anyway. And you didn't know then what you know now. I honestly don't know what I would have done in your place. And it worked, Lieutenant. I didn't know if you saw or not...but it worked. These...whatever they are...must have thought we'd double-crossed them. I wish I could be more certain of that, but they're not too big on the chit-chat. All I know for a fact is that they'd been informed by spies in the city that the EM barrier didn't work."

Malcolm sniffed and blinked against the sodden darkness, letting himself drift into the circle of her arm as she bristled his hair. He looked into the utter blackness of her hair and the angle of her shoulder, finding the emptiness cathartic. "And the governors knew about the spies, didn't they?" he whispered. "That's why they told me it hadn't worked, why they told everyone it was a colossal failure. They were planting false information. But how did you know?"

"I've got good ears, Lieutenant. Too good, sometimes. And yes; I know exactly what I do to you, and I do it on purpose."

Caught in a wave of dizziness, Malcolm rested his head on her shoulder a moment, glad that she wouldn't see him blush. "You weren't supposed to hear that."

"And you weren't supposed to get carried away with a subordinate." Her voice was like packed ice against a sore tooth, cold and uncomforting but hitting the spot it should to uproot the pain. A hand crept up and swept across his brow above the right eye, down over his cheek, volcanic to the touch and hypnotic—call it the painkiller. He waited, braced, vaguely anxious that time was wasting but even more anxious, and more certain, that she would say no more.

She did.

"But you did it," she said, more kindly. "You must think I was born yesterday, Malcolm. You've broken rules before, and I know it bothers you when you do...but it's never stopped you. You've taken risks when it really mattered." A smile twisted Malcolm's face as he felt those very determined fingers take their customary position at the base of his neck, cradling his tousled head and raising it carefully from her shoulder. "So I know that wasn't the reason you backed off. Chestnuts?" she asked, softly.

Malcolm somehow kept the smile in place, although it stung to do it. He wasn't used to feeling two feet tall. "Chestnuts," he agreed. "Maybe even dessert."

"As long as it's not marshmallows, you're on." Hoshi grinned, and her hands fell away. For the first time since being bundled brutally into that armoured hover vehicle Malcolm was standing, unaided, his back groaning with complaint and his head swollen still from the gas—but he felt fine.

Incredible, actually. Maybe Phlox should start prescribing regular Hoshi as a cure for depression.

"So what next?" he asked, as both stared, hypnotised, at the cascading curtain of foaming white water in front of them.

"Aren't I supposed to ask you that, Lieutenant?"

"Well, you could, Ensign, but I'd hate to rain on your parade when you're so obviously enjoying yourself."

Hoshi tilted that seductive, brow-arching gaze at him again, went to the cave wall, and pressed a tiny outcropping of rock. Instantly the waterfall that roared like a thousand seas lessened, quietened, and dwindled until only quivering ribbons of water and scuds of foam remained, and a blue moon glowed beyond the cave mouth.

"Ah. That solves the getting-dashed-into-interesting-puddles-of-red problem, anyway." Malcolm tottered unsteadily to the cave's brink, and looked down. Twenty feet below him the turbulent black water he remembered with such instinctive dread, like a tiny fingernail scratching at a blackboard in the back of his mind, was boiling down into silken ebony, the lake calming as the waterfall abated. It looked deep, down there.

It looked like a grave.

Hoshi's hand was suddenly in his, and as he turned with the inevitable question on his lips she stopped it with a kiss. Malcolm let the uncertainty fade unasked and concentrated instead on the warmth of her, on the tiny whips of tangled black hair tickling his neck, and the wet skin gliding against him. She broke from him first and seriously, eyes fixed on him like a targeting scanner, laid little kisses like spots of fire across his cheek. Then, pressing her mouth to his ear, she whispered: "Haven't you learned anything, Malcolm? I won't let you drown."

Malcolm pulled back, startled. And then he did a funny thing; he laughed. "Promise?"

"Promise."

He was still laughing as they linked hands, kissed...and jumped.


End file.
